February 17th, 2008
MWC08: Opera Mobile 9.5 running on a Sony Ericsson UIQ device
Opera Software announced that Opera Mobile 9.5 would be coming soon and would be shown at the Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona. I had a chance to visit the Opera Software booth and spoke with a product manager who ran through this latest mobile browser on a Sony Ericsson UIQ device. You can see some of the features of Opera Mobile 9.5 in action in the following video.
The HTC Advantage I have been using for several months comes with Opera Mobile 8.5 preloaded in the ROM and is actually the selected default browser on the device. Opera Mobile 8.5 makes the device much more useful for me since I find Internet Explorer Mobile to be a weak mobile browser. However, there are still a few websites I need to visit that Opera Mobile 8.5 doesn’t fully support and I am hoping that Opera Mobile 9.5 provides this needed functionality and from the press release and seeing it in action I think this just may be the browser I need.
Opera Mobile 9.5 has been improved with new zooming and panning capabilities, faster page loading, Flash Lite 3 support (up to OEMs and operators), and Opera Widget capable. Other features include tabbed browsing, landscape support, call phone number from a web page, send a link as a text message, and much more. The public beta should be available soon and I can’t wait to try it out.
Matthew Miller is an avid mobile device enthusiast who works during the day as a professional naval architect in Seattle. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
