As Opera continues to chip away at its competition and gain mobile market share, you can bet it’s not resting on any laurels. The software company has just released its 9.7 Beta version for Windows Mobile and promises to render pages faster and with better compression. The new version also includes Opera Widgets manager. Do note that this is still in beta and will have some issues:
- Opera Turbo in Opera Mobile is still a preview-feature;
- Downloads don’t work while Opera Turbo is enabled.
- Some settings (such as toggle on/off images) do not apply when Opera Turbo is enabled.
- On older WM 5.0 Devices with 480×800 resolution, switching between portrait and landscape may cause display errors. This is due to lack of support for this resolution in early versions of Microsoft’s driver.
- Some input method editors are known not to work well with Opera because they do not comply with Microsoft’s SIP and/or IME standard. When such an editor is detected by Opera, Opera will use a known (default) input method instead. An exception is EzInput v1.5, where the phone keypad and compact QUERTY, ABC mode doesn’t work, but the rest of the modes work fine. We recommend upgrading to EzInput v2.0 to avoid this.
- Only support for FlashLite 3.x. No Flash plugin included.
Still, it looks like a fine upgrade and a great direction for Opera mobile, especially with the new widgets manager. Check it out and let us know what you think.
