A recent blog post at Opera.com revealed the near release of Opera Mobile 9.7 for Windows Mobile touchscreen Devices. The new beta version of Opera Mobile will come with several interesting and important enhancements but unfortunately no Symbian support. Among the features are the new Presto 2.2 rendering engine that is passing the Acid 3 test with a score of 100/100 which seems to be a first for mobile web browsers. This is the same rendering engine that the preview version of Opera’s latest desktop web browser Opera 10 makes use of.
Opera Turbo has been added to the mobile web browser which is a compression technique that is routing Internet traffic through a server that is compressing the contents so that they can be delivered more rapidly to the user. The monthly bandwidth bill will also benefit from Opera Turbo as compressed data reduces the overall bandwidth consumption of the mobile device.
Other improvements in Opera Mobile 9.7 are the improved widget manager which runs independently from the web browser, Google Gears support and hardware acceleration with OpenGL ES support. Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta has not yet been released but it is expected to be released soon. Opera created a speed comparison video between Opera Mobile 9.7 with Opera Turbo enabled, Opera Mobile 9.7 without Opera Turbo and Microsoft IE Mobile.
The loading times differ widely. Opera Turbo speeds up the page loading time of that specific page by more than 20 seconds when compared to Opera Mobile 9.7 without Opera Turbo and an amazing 3 minutes 7 seconds in comparison to Internet Explorer Mobile.
Related posts:
Opera 9.5 Mobile Beta 2Opera Turbo
Opera 9.5 beta is out
Web Browser: Opera Turbo Preview
Opera 10 Beta
Opera Mini 5 beta
Opera 10 Alpha Passes Acid 3 Test
Opera 10 Beta 2 Released
[...] Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta Announced [...]