Opera Mobile 9.7 beta 1 running on an Xperia X1

[Guest David Strange]

I installed Opera Mobile 9.7 beta 1 on my Xperia X1 as soon as it was released this morning. So far I am reasonably impressed.

First, the bad things:

Opera Turbo: We are told this will speed up page loads by up to 80% on slow connections (my emphasis). If you dig around a bit you'll find out that we are also told it won't make much difference on 3G and WiFi connections. How many people really do that much browsing on GPRS/EDGE these days? Most phones that are sold are 3/3.5G and WiFi points are not so difficult to find. So that is pointless. Worse, if you turn Opera Turbo on you cannot download files. Pretty crap, eh?

No real upgrade option: When I installed Opera Mobile 9.7 I hoped it'd keep all of my settings and favourites from 9.5. No such luck. You have to enter all of your favourites and teach it your usernames/passwords again.

Opera:config: This is stunningly slow, particularly if you try and use the search.

No zooming in/out with volume control: I'm sure I could find something in a configuration file to fix this, but in 9.5 the volume controls on my xperia would zoom in and out, 9.7 doesn't do this.

urlfilter.ini: I'm yet to find a place where I can put this file where it will block ads as it did in 9.5*.

OK, they are a bit of a drag, but not so serious if we are honest.

So, the improvements I like:

Its is very fast: Both at loading and panning/zooming pages. Using OpenGL ES has sped up the latter no end.

It looks great: Renders pages with a beauty that makes Skyfire rancid with envy. The ui is pretty good looking on the Xperia.

Standards: We are told this got 100% in the ACID3 test. In practise this means it'll display any webpage correctly. At least, it has so far this morning...

AJAX support: The Javascript/AJAX-y pages I have gone to this morning seem to work quickly and well.

Apart from that it seems very much like 9.5, which is the best Windows Mobile browser I have used.

So I am reasonably pleased with it and have made it my default browser.

Cheers,

David.

*I found I could manually edit a configuation file to tell it where urlfilter.ini is, but it apparently isn't supported in this version. Bums.

Edited June 8, 2009 by David Strange