Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta
Opera has done it once again, they put out another stunning and snappy web browser. Vastly superior to the pathetic ‘portable’ Internet Explorer that comes default with Windows Mobile smart phones and pocket PCs. It defaults to full-website view zoomed-out so you can choose where to zoom in and scroll, and all that fancy stuff. In its core, it is not much different than previous versions of Opera Mobile (7, 8, 8.65, etcetc), but it actually WORKS this time around. The bottom bar is white now, instead of black - and get this - it actually shows the entire bar in both portrait AND landscape mode! Zooming and panning is much the same, a bit smoother maybe, but it will still get interfered with if you happen to have an HTC Phone with TouchFlo installed and enabled (that cool spinny cube with favorite contacts, media options, and the 6 app launcher.) You will have to either learn to pan around TouchFlo or simply add Opera to the TouchFlo exclusions list (located in the touchflo options menus somewhere.)
Well enough about HTC devices, let us see how it stacks up to the only real contender here, Safari Mobile.
I will say, as much as I hate Apple and Safari - Safari Mobile does many things correctly. Really smooth panning and 2-finger gesture zooming is very intuitive (well many other smart phones that do not begin with the letter ‘i’ lack the hardware support for multi-touch gestures such as spreading you thumb and forefinger apart to zoom out, or pinching them together to zoom in.) I’d say that Opera is definitely ‘faster’ than Safari in menu and page loading, (or maybe my HTC 8925 is just faster than an iPhone, I can not tell which) - but Safari has a better search, better bookmarking, better zooming, and smoother scrolling (which again is somewhat a function of the iPhone touch screen, its just so much better than many other touch interfaces on the market.)
The bottom line here? If you like standard HTML/PHP/Java support and a decent web browsing experience (without all the pathetic limitations of ‘mobile browsing’) go download and try the new Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta now, for free. Maybe you really love Internet Explorer, and its pathetic jaggy scrolling, or the word ‘BETA’ scares you when its not referenced to fish. That is fine, Opera Mobile will still be there once you come around.
And remember, the new 9.5 BETA is really only meant for Windows Mobile devices that have a touch screen — good luck trying to use this thing on a Samsung Blackberry, seriously.