Recently we saw the release of the Opera Mini 5 browser, which took web browsing for mobiles to another level, with support for page thumbnails on the home screen, multiple tabs, and a password manager. With Opera Mini 5 you get an experience similar to the what you’d get from the desktop Opera browser.
While the beta of Opera Mobile 10 for Symbian smartphones was released about two weeks ago, now we have the release of Opera 10 for Windows Mobile which closes the gap between its mobile and desktop products. Now sporting a interface similar to Opera Mini 5 the Opera Mobile 10 brings you an experience which is closer to the desktop.
Opera already introduced its Turbo feature — which accelerates the download of content by compressing the content and resizing images for mobile sizes — in a beta of Opera Mobile 9.7, and the feature continues to be an important part of the Opera Mobile experience in the version 10 beta.
Closely matching the looks and feature set of the Opera Mini 5 beta, the Opera Mobile 10 beta for Windows mobiles bring with it a desktop-Opera-like Speed Dial which shows thumbnails of nine websites of your choice on your home screen, tabbed browsing with tabs which show page thumbnails, and a password manager which is of immense use for people on mobiles where typing secure and cryptic passwords can be a pain.
The new version is based on the desktop browser engine, and now sports much better web compatibility, allowing you to use advanced web features such as AJAX on your mobile phone. It also features better navigation abilities for both touchscreen and keypad based navigation.
Among other features, Opera Mobile 10 can now save pictures from pages, and auto-completion of URLs, which are sure to come handy on a mobile.
Unifying the looks is definitely a good thing, there is not much point to having a the same product for performing the same task looking different across platforms. While the desktop browser still has ways to go before it can take on Firefox and Chrome, on the Mobile front at-least it is good to see it going strong.
Check out the image gallery below for some pictures of the new mobile browser.