Opera Previews New PC-Like Mobile Browser

Opera Software has become the latest in a growing group of companies announcing new tools to deliver PC-like--or at least iPhone-like--browsing on cell phones.

Opera Mobile 9.5, the latest version of Opera for smartphones, introduces a new user interface, the ability to pan and zoom on Web pages, and support for Opera Widgets, little applets that pull together content from various Web sources.

Other features include support for Flash Lite 3 and the ability to send Web site images and text via SMS or MMS. Opera also claims its new mobile browser is significantly faster than the Windows Mobile version of Internet Explorer.

Opera introduced many of these features in Opera Mini for feature phones, but Mini depends on server-side processing. Opera Mobile 9.5 uses the power inside today's smartphones--no server-side help is required.

Opera says Mobile 9.5 will be available for Linux, Windows Mobile, and the UIQ platform. The company didn't say exactly when beta versions of Opera Mobile 9.5 would start to appear, but I and other attendees at next week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, will get a closer look at demos there.

Meanwhile, here are some screenshots. The first shows how Opera Mobile 9.5 renders CNN as a full page on a small screen:

When in full-screen mode, menus pop up when you tap a transparent icon in the lower right-hand corner:

Opera Mobile 9.5, like its predecessors, supports tabbed browsing. You can create and select tabs from a pop-up menu, accessed from the small taskbar that appears at the bottom of the screen in standard viewing mode:

This last screen shows how you'll be able to send text or images from Web pages as SMS or MMS messages:

Want more? You can view a video demo of Opera Mobile 9.5 on Opera's Web site.

Improved browsing is shaping up as the next big thing in cell phones. At last week's Demo conference, another full-featured mobile browser called SkyFire got a lot of attention, and I expect to see more at Mobile World Congress.

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