A few people had been asking, "If Opera Mobile 9.7 is coming, why's 9.5 still in beta?" The Opera Mobile blog explains:

Our core department has released a new version of Opera Presto which contained support for Opera Turbo, more advanced web standards, Gears and several other improvements. We wanted to make this available to our users as soon as possible, and chose to upgrade the core version in Opera Mobile. Updating the browser core is a big step forward for us, and it felt natural to change the version number.

We have to upgrade to a new browser core as often as possible. Several products using a wide range of browser core versions introduces a lot of overhead (several version of core has to be maintained and worked on at the same time), so we try to use the most current stable core version at all times.

Makes sense to us. Now, can we get a copy of 9.7 already? :)

We know, we know, you had set your alarm for Midnight tonight and were planning on constantly refreshing Opera's site all day tomorrow (the day we expected it) so you could download the holy grail of Windows Mobile browsers: Opera Mobile 9.5. Or maybe that was just us.

You can go ahead and reset your alarm clock, because Opera's going to take a couple more days to hammer out some last-minute bugs on the browser before they unleash the beta on the world. Killing bugs before a Beta release? It's almost like a software company cares about user experience and killing bugs. Actually, it's exactly like that, because this is Opera we're talking about.

As you can imagine, we encountered a few bugs last week that we needed to fix before we launch. Our engineering team worked through the weekend to fix the bugs. Even though our release is a beta, we'd rather spend the extra time to fix them, thus giving you a better experience. The fixes are almost complete now, but we need two more days to run the build through our quality assurance testing. The new launch date is now set for the 17th.

read: my.opera.com, via the::unwired

Opera's browser for the desktop is actually stepping up to 9.5 and showing off its great new features. Many of you already love Opera Mini and can’t live without it. This new desktop version will hopefully make your mobile life complete. One of the ways Opera plans to do this is to synchronize your bookmarks between your desktop web browser and your Opera Mini mobile. This should save time and frustration with all your information. Opera also adds new security enhancements like malware protection and improved fraud protection.

This is all fine and dandy for the desktop browser but where is our mobile 9.5 version!? The custom version is already shipping on the HTC Diamond, so while we've been patient before, we'll admit we're starting to get just a little antsy.

On a side note, we're also intrigued by Dragonfly, which looks like a great set of development tools for Opera that give it a better shot at being a platform instead of just a browser.