Opera signaled it’s ready to do battle in the browser wars on Android with a release of Opera Mobile, its full browser. The release of Opera Mobile 10.1 beta follows up on the launch of Opera Mini on Android in July and brings a number of features that should help it compete in an increasingly crowded space.
Opera Mobile will bring an extra boost of speed via Opera Turbo, pinch-to-zoom, speed dialing, geo-location support, bookmark syncing on multiple devices, tabbed bookmarks and long-click menus. You can render pages locally for more clarity of if you use Turbo Boost, you can have Opera’s servers compress the data and speed it to you faster. The app can be downloaded here.
This is Opera’s chance to really compete on Android. The Mini launch was nice but it didn’t bring the feature set of Opera, which is necessary to compete against Firefox, Dolphin Browser HD, Skyfire and the stock Android browser. Kevin liked Opera Mini back in July saying it was fast and data efficient but he found the rendering and zooming a little dated. Opera Mobile aims to build off the success of Mini while improving some of the look and feel. So far, it looks like the zooming is better though the rendering of images can be a little pixelated at first. One thing Opera Mobile doesn’t offer right now is Flash support, which is reportedly coming in a future release.
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