Last week, Opera announced the latest beta version of their Mobile browser on the Windows Mobile platform. The Dev.Opera site has a nice breakdown of the latest features:
- New rendering engine: Opera Mobile 9.7 uses our Opera Presto 2.2 rendering engine, which gives improved speed, 100/100 on the Acid 3 test, and many new standards support improvements, as you’ll see below
- Improved support for Opera Widgets: Opera Mobile supports Opera Widgets, Opera’s self-contained, cross-device applications built using web standards. Browse to the Opera Widgets homepage using Opera Mobile 9.7 beta and try some out
- Widget Manager: This release also features a new Widget Manager with improved usability and design, which runs independently from the browser
- Opera Mobile 9.7 supports Opera Turbo: This is a simple but effective feature that, when turned on, compresses pages by up to 80%, giving you a faster browsing experience if you are in a low or patchy bandwidth area. It does not use the same compression technology as Opera Mini, but it is similar. You can read more about Opera Turbo on labs.opera.com
- Google Gears support: Gears is an open source project that allows improved web applications with features such as offline storage and worker threads to help tired processors handle number crunching. Read more about it below
Those last two are interesting, especially the idea of Gears on a mobile device. Can’t get a signal but need to review an old email? I haven’t tested it yet, but might have to with Gmail.
In my limited testing so far, the new version does feel noticeably faster than the previous version – and I have yet to try the “turbo” mode.
Definitely worth a shot if you’re looking for a much better browsing experience than what comes from the default pocket IE browser. I just haven’t figured out the best way to compare it to the recently updated Skyfire browser…
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June 17th, 2009 
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