Opera Mobile 9.5 Promises the web in Your Pocket
Opera has announced a new version of Opera Mobile for cell phones and mobile devices. Opera Mobile 9.5 will feature a completely re-written rendering engine and promises to make the mobile web just like, well, the web.
Unfortunately, the software isn’t be available for download just yet. While public betas haven’t been announced, Opera will be showing off the new browser at next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and the company has posted the video above, showing off the new interface.
In the movie Opera compares Mobile to Pocket Internet Explorer and shows off dramatically faster page loads compared to Pocket IE. For the sake of informal comparison I loaded the same page in my iPhone and Opera Mobile came out ahead there as well. Of course there’s no way of knowing what kind of connection Opera is using in the movie versus what I have at my house, so take that with a grain of salt.
Still, if the movie above is a genuinely fair comparison, Opera Mobile’s speed is impressive.
But speed isn’t the only thing in the upcoming release. There’s a new navigation interface that behaves very similarly to the iPhone’s mobile Safari — zooming happens through double tapping and the menus are also similar to what we’ve seen in mobile Safari or the coming mobile version of Firefox.
Other nice features include the ability to send links and images as SMS messages and full compatibility with Opera Widgets — the company’s set of downloadable, site-specific apps.
Opera Mobile 9.5 will be available on all major platforms including Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux, as both a standalone browser and as a SDK. We’ll be sure to keep you updated when the betas are released.
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