Opera Mobile 9.5 Coming Soon(ish). It's Fast.

Hot on the heels of the announcement of SkyFire, Opera comes out punching with a video demo of Opera Mobile 9.5. The new stuff is sweet. First up, wicked fast rendering, about 2.5 times faster than Pocket IE (Opera rubs it in just a little much in the video). Opera also gets that we usually want a decent, usable fullscreen mode by default. There's a little semi-transparent area you can tap to bring up your various buttons. It follows the iPhone's lead by rendering the entire page and letting you zoom in to what you're interested in. That rendering also looks awfully darn accurate, too. We could go on... Oh, let's go on: Better tab support. Double-tap to zoom in and out. Stored passwords. Auto-send images directly from the browser. Fast.

Oh, and widgets, because everybody needs widgets. Remember the original wireless Palm pilot and its quasi-apps that were really just light portals to web information? Yeah, it's like that.

Opera Mobile 9.5