Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 27 June 2008 08:25
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
Opera Mobile 9.5 promises some cool features that will make it stand out from the browser that’s already installed on your Symbian or Windows Mobile phone.
These include improved text wrap which automatically align Web pages with the screen edge, a zoom feature that quickly loads full pages ready to visually scan and then double tap to zoom into the area you want.
You can use your finger tip or the stylus to navigate, you can have a “mouse cursor” on screen if you want, tabbed browsing to handle multiple windows is built-in as standard, an address “auto complete” remembers past sites you’ve visited, a password manager remembers user names and passwords you’ve saved for different sites.
Flash-ready capabilities are promised, presumably using Flash Lite 3, to allow you to watch YouTube and other Flash videos directly in the browser – not in a separate YouTube application. A pop-up handler stops pop-ups from being a pain.
You can quickly set the browser to ‘landscape’ mode to view content in ‘widescreen’, your history and bookmarks are there as you’d expect and you can easily send images on web pages via email or MMS to others.
Pages can be saved for “offline viewing”, a very handy little feature, there’s support for “hardware-accelerated” browsing which means smooth transitions and loads of pages and the Window, Opera Widgets (for which there is an SDK) lets you create apps that work through Opera, and the browser is AJAX friendly so you can access sites like Facebook to see and use just like they are on your desktop PC.
The
Opera Mobile blog is the site to bring us the news that July 15 is the date we can expect to see the Windows Mobile version of Opera Mobile 9.5 beta.
The browser will also be available for Symbian devices but the blog entry doesn’t make any reference to it also being available in beta form on the same date.
So, why has it taken so long? Opera Software explains... on page 3. Please read on.
