also includes Opera's latest Small-Screen Rendering engine.
(Click here for larger image)Opera
first announced last summer that it was porting its browser to Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform, and then quietly released a "technical preview" of a version of the Opera mobile browser supporting Windows Mobile smartphones in October,
announcing it publicly in December. The company says the previews were "enthusiastically received by 120,000 end-users," who downloaded, tested, and provided "valuable feedback."
"Originally, we had not planned to make Opera available on the Windows Mobile platform, but users kept asking for it because they were disappointed with the far from satisfactory performance of the browser that came shipped on their devices," says Jon S. von Tetzchner, Opera's CEO.
Opera's mobile browser includes "Small Screen Rendering" (SSR) technology, which "intelligently reformats" web pages to fit within the tiny screens of handheld mobile devices as shown in the example below. SSR is intended to solve the problem that most web pages are written for, and tested at, a minimum width of 800 pixels, whereas the displays of mobile phones and other handheld devices have much lower resolution.
Example of Opera browser's Small Screen Rendering. The left image indicates how a normal web page tends to display on a smartphone's small LCD; the right image shows how SSR renders the page.
(Click each image for a larger view)
AvailabilityOpera 8 for Windows Mobile 2003 Smartphone is available for free download on Opera's
website. The current release is restricted to Windows Mobile Smartphone 2003, but a version that will support Windows Mobile Pocket PC is "under development," the company says.
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