Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta Gets Widgets, Updates
As a few sites around the web have predicted, Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta got itself a shiny new update this morning. They've added widgets to the browser (or is it a platform now?) and also updated their SDK for development of mobile widgets, not to mention Dragonfly, a set of on-device developer tools. All that looks pretty good to us, we're just glad they've updated wishing they would update their text wrapping to match the on-device version of Opera on the Diamond series, because the current setup is really harshing our mellow. Other notables:
- Custom software keyboards are still a little wacky
- No Flash (yet)
- English Only
- You have to keep Opera running when the widgets manager is running
You can head on over to http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/ to grab the download. Ball's now in your court, er, courts Microsoft, SkyFire, Mozilla, et al.
Thanks to Jeremy for the tip!
Update: I just installed and noticed a few things. One -- my Treo Pro is pretty hacked up, so it might just be me, but it didn't seem to install over the previous Beta, which led me running out of storage memory. You might want to consider uninstalling the previous version first. Two -- Under Settings -> Advanced, there's a new slider to allow you to set your cache size. (We'd still recommend the hack that moves your cache over to the storage card if you're worried about storage memory, but it doesn't seem to be working for me just yet). Three -- the widgets are kind of fun, but we're not seeing anything that's killer yet.
