The waiting game is almost over. We have known for a couple months that Opera Mobile 10 would be making its way to Android and the company has finally released the first version to OEMs.
Opera Mini 4.2 has been available on Android for most of this year, but Opera Mobile 10 will offer an entirely new experience targeted towards smartphones.
Opera Mobile 10 offers many exciting features like Opera Turbo which increases page load times up to 50%. Opera Widgets will also allow developers to create their own add-ons for the mobile browser.
Opera will offer one mobile interface on any mobile phone.
I had a brief chance to play with Opera Mobile 10 running on a HTC Hero and I came away very impressed. Even though my time was limited, I got the feel Opera was taking Android very serious and plans to fully support the platform over the coming years. It will be refreshing to have an alternative browser from a major player that receives routine updates. Google has been slow to update the official Android browser and PocketFox might not be available for months.
Benefits of Opera Mobile 10 include:
- A true Web experience optimized for mobile phones
- The ability to offer Web applications right on the idle screen
- The full richness of Web 2.0 services using AJAX
- Blazing speed with Opera Turbo
- Ability to offer Opera Widgets
- A proven product with focus on innovation, quality and user experience
- A single reference UI to deploy to any phone
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Taylor Wimberly
Taylor is the founder of Android and Me. He loves playing with all kinds of gadgets, but most importantly cell phones. His other hobbies include cooking (BBQ hero!), politics, football, and watching every MMA event possible.
12 Comments
Will this browser support Multi-Touch?
Yes, but when WILL the wait be over??
I’m super excited about this. Ive always thought the default browser was a major Android weak point. Maybe some OEM person will “accidently” leak it
As a developer of web applications, I _love_ browser wars (except back in the day when it was about incompatible additions).
Looking forward to this coming about.
Wonder if NPAPI will be available for this Opera release (native API, of course)…
How soon will the general public be able to get it?
What is interesting, how does it compare to Dolphin? As many users I currently set Dolphin as a default browser in Android.
Why bother? The browser in 2.0 is perfectly fine. And if Flash is indeed released for it in 2010 I can’t see any reason to switch.
Does it support Multi-Touch? if it doesn’t then it doesn’t matter when is coming out. I’m using Dolphin right now and works pretty good. Dolphin needs some performance enhancements and the Multi-Touch is not perfect BUT it works.
OH GOD YES! I’ve waited so long. Opera 10 on my laptop is amazing, I cannot wait for this on my Droid!
Come on Mobile Firefox.. we’re waiting…
One UI for different platforms=fail.
There’s a reason different platforms have different UI frameworks. Opera didn’t get that on the PC and Mac, seems they haven’t learned a thing.
There’s also a reason why it is one of the most used browsers on phones: and that’s because the native browser on WinMo is so terrible that Opera is the better choice.