Norwegian software company Opera announced on Friday the release of a new version of its Opera Mobile 10, namely the Beta 3 flavor, which brings the mobile browser one step closer to the final release. The fresh solution is now available for download both for Symbian S60 mobile phones and for devices powered by Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform, and comes with a great deal of features, as well as with various bug fixes and stability enhancements.Among the main improvements the new Opera Mobile 10 Beta 3 comes around with, we can count support for keypad devices running under the Windows Mobile 6 standard OS, as well as for Windows Mobile 5 smartphones, and an experimental Flashlite 3.1 for Windows Mobile phones, which is only available for touch devices. “Flash performance and usability depends greatly on how powerful your device is. On the 1Ghz HTC Touch HD2 the overall experience is quite good. On anything slower it varies from mediocre to poor,” the company notes.
Other enhancements the fresh version of Opera Mobile 10 comes with include:
S60:
- Complete bookmark sync in Opera Link
- Support for non-Latin characters in the UI also when phone is set to Latin locale (requires international build)
- A lot of input and keyboard related fixes
- Fixed text selection
- Visual indication of input mode also for non-Latin input modes
- General bug fixing (stability, UI)
Windows Mobile:
- keypad/smartphone support
- Flash Lite 3.1 support (disabled by default)
- Complete bookmark sync in Opera Link
- BIDI support also for language extensions
- phone numbers in plain text are converted to links
- support for background sound
- general bug fixing (stability, UI).
However, the company also notes that there are some issues with the new release that users should be aware of, such as the fact that all bookmarks saved with Beta 2 will be lost when upgrading or that Hotmail won't work. On S60 devices, “after permanently accepting an untrusted certificate, you get an error when trying to load the https:// page again. Workaround: In the S60 device menu go to the Settings -> General -> Security -> Certificate Management -> Trusted site certificates and delete the certificate for the problematic site.”
As for Windows Mobile phones, the flash feature is disabled by default, since there are performance issues with it, and one can enable it from Tools -> Settings -> Advanced and set plug-ins to "On." “Note that Opera Mobile has Click-to-play functionality for plug-ins. So even when plug-ins are enabled you activate individual Flash content by clicking on it. This to minimize the use of bandwith and CPU on content you may not be interested in,” the maker points out as well.
Additional details on the new Opera Mobile 10 Beta 3 can be found on the company's website. Those who would like to download the application on their devices will have to go to www.opera.com/mobile/download/ from a PC or to m.opera.com from the browser on their mobile phone.
