Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta Goes Live for WinMo Phones Only

From DailyTech: Hailing from Norway, third-party browser makers Opera made headlines last week with the release of Opera 10 beta, a worthy challenger to Firefox 3.5 and Internet Explorer 8. This week, the company's releases continued with Opera Mobile 9.7 beta for Windows Mobile phones on Monday.

The long-awaited browser is set to challenge Skyfire's reign as the top Windows Mobile browser. Like Skyfire, it offers server-side compression to load pages faster. It also offers mobile Flash, something which the mobile version of Internet Explorer doesn't support.

Early reports indicate the browser is quite fast, faster even than Skyfire. However, they also indicate that Opera still has work to do and some kinks to iron out. Flash support is still incomplete and Google Gears, a key feature of the new browser is also not supported. Further, when in the faster compression mode, the browser reportedly crashes on pages with complex layouts.

Also the support for non-standard software keyboards is very poor and the browser's rotation function is broken. That said, it’s important to remember how Internet Explorer Mobile currently lags behind the competition in features, and how buggy Skyfire was when first released. The unfortunate fact in the world of mobile browsing is that the vast majority of browsers are works in progress.

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