Article by George Norman

On 09 Jun 2009

The development team at Opera has a new offering for those of you that are constantly on the go and use your smartphone to access the web, and this offering is Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta. We first got a glimpse of Opera Mobile 9.7 back in April, so it’s nice to see that the Beta took just a couple of months to be released; it is even nicer to see that Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta comes with goodies such as the Presto 2.2 rendering engine and Opera Turbo.

Product Manager with Opera Software, Frode Hauge, comments: “The big news in this release is Opera Turbo. Opera Turbo is a server-side compression technology that compresses data up to 80% before it is sent to the mobile phone. Opera Turbo speeds up your browsing experience significantly when you are on a low bandwidth network (like EDGE). You will however not notice such a big effect when you're connected through WiFi or a high-speed mobile network. You can turn on Opera Turbo in the advanced section in the browser settings.


Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta highlights:
- Presto 2.2 rendering engine allows for faster page loads.
- Opera Turbo compression
- Improved widget manager.
- Support for Google Gears.
- OpenGL ES support for smoother scrolling and panning. The hardware acceleration provided by OpenGL ES also allows for a more fluid UI (user interface).

“There are other mobile browsers on the market that claim to be faster and more Web site-compatible on Windows-based phones, but I challenge users to take Opera Mobile for a test drive and discover a new standard for speed and compatibility. Opera Mobile 9.7 leaves other ‘sluggish’ and ‘painfully slow’ browsers in the dust,” commented Opera Software CEO, Jon von Tetzchner.

If you would like to get Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta, a download location is available here.

In related news, the development team at Opera also released Opera 10 Beta 1 which comes with the following highlights:
- Visual tabs, which are hidden by default.
- Speed Dial with support for more than 9 sites.
- Customizable Speed Dial background.
- Opera Turbo for faster browsing speeds on a slow internet connection.
- Automatic updates: the browser will update itself automatically whenever a new version is rolled out.
- New crashlogging tool.
- New inline spelling checker.
- Automatically remove messages from POP servers after a specific amount of time has passed.
- Improved Opera Presto 2.2 rendering engine.
- Several UI (user interface) changes.
A complete changelog is available here; a download location is available here.



Tags: Opera, Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta, Opera Turbo

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