Opera 9.5 this way cometh (at some point (soon))

Another week, another "Holy Grail" of mobile web browsers for Windows Mobile.

Remember last week? It was Skyfire, from a company nobody heard of and most tech sites were tripping over themselves hailing it as the greatest thing since sliced bread? Ugh, enough already. Actually ship the product instead of talking about it and then I'll be a little more impressed.

This week, it's Opera Mobile 9.5. At least Opera is a company that many of us already know. It's even the default browser for my Motorola Q9h.

From the official Opera site:

Built on Opera's unique core architecture, the Opera Mobile 9.5 desktop-like browsing experience has been enhanced with innovations such as zooming and panning that make it easier to navigate, load pages quicker and get users closer to the Web content and entertainment they want. With Opera Mobile 9.5, users can experience the real Web and interact with content exactly as they do on their PC.

The Opera Mobile 9.5 experience includes many of the innovations found in Opera's trend-setting desktop browser including:

• Intuitive user interface
• Tabbed browsing
• Improved text wrap
• Page overview, zooming and panning
• Landscape mode
• Save Web page for future offline access
• Call phone number from Web page
• Send link as SMS/MMS
• Send image as SMS/MMS
• Small Screen Rendering™
• Password manager
• Web address input auto-completion
• History and bookmarks
• Copy text
• Opera Widgets

I've never been one for mobile web browsing, but I'd be more inclined to go with Opera Mobile than anyone else at the moment. Not because I think Opera Mini on my Q9 is better than IE Mobile, I don't.

As slow and clunky as IE Mobile is, the few (count on one hand) times I've ever absolutely, positively HAD to access the web from my phone, I found Opera Mini to be just as clunky as IE Mobile. But, with the integration of Windows Mobile with my Windows PC and IE7, I'd already saved my most critical sites as Mobile Favorites so I could get on and off as quickly as possible.

But, to be fair to the good work that the folks at Opera have done, once you get passed the gratuitous IE Mobile bashing at the beginning of the Opera Mobile video demo, it does look like it might even get me to think twice about reaching for my phone to browse the web instead of waiting to get to a real computer.

Comments

[GoodThings2Life]

I'm definitely looking forward to giving it a try. The Mobile IE team really needs to get in gear on this one, although I'll understand if they wait for the release of IE8 for Windows first.