Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta Announced

Martin — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:47:53 +0000

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.

Opera 9.5 Mobile Beta 2

Martin — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 08:04:00 +0000

The Opera development team seems to be doing their thing opposed to other browser developers who are more focused on the competition. The team released the second beta of the upcoming Opera 9.5 mobile browser yesterday which can be currently downloaded and tested but is supposed to be a commercial product once it is released in its final version. The current version Opera 8.65 is available for €19 at the Opera online store and this is probably the same price range that users can expect of Opera 9.6 mobile unless the Opera sales team would decide that they had to reduce the price because of the competition of the new Firefox mobile browser.

The new Opera 9.5 beta 2 is currently available for Windows Mobile and Symbian UIQ. A release for Symbian S60 phones is planned for 2009. The biggest new feature in this version is the mobile widgets support. Users should not confuse mobile widgets with widgets in desktop versions of Opera because they work and act different which is mainly caused by the limited screen space of mobile phones.

Widgets for Opera mobile are basically one click services that either open a function or website directly. Only a few widgets are currently available including a clock, Twitter or weather information.

Other additions are a new Zoom slider and some user interface and usability improvements in addition to many under-the-hood fixes in the browser core. It is a good time now to test the new Opera mobile browser if you have a mobile device running Windows Mobile or Symbian UIQ.

Tags: firefox mobile, mobile browser, opera, opera 9.5, opera mobile, opera widgets, symbian uiq, windows mobile

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