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Opera has said Mobile 10's new Flash support offers a "quite good" experience on 1GHz phones, but can still be "mediocre to poor" on slower devices. For that reason, it's said, the plug-in is not activated by default, but can be turned on via the browser's settings menu. To minimize CPU and bandwidth usage, Mobile 10 also requires that users click on Flash content before it will begin to play, the company adds.
According to Opera, Mobile 10's Flash support is only provided on touchscreen devices. But other improvements, which extend to the keypad-only version too, are said to include Opera Link bookmark syncing, automatic conversion of phone numbers on web pages to click-and-dial links, support for background sound, and a variety of stability fixes.
The key feature of Opera Mobile 10, touted as "elevating mobile browsing to a desktop-like experience," is its user interface, which has been redesigned with features inherited from Opera's browser for desktop computers. The interface includes Speed Dial (below left), designed to store thumbnails of frequently launched websites on a page that appears whenever the browser is launched.
According to Opera, its browser also features tabbed browsing (above right), complete with visual thumbnails that make it easy to switch from page to page. Meanwhile, navigation buttons have been simplified, and a pop-up settings menu (left) lets users choose whether or not to use compression and to load mobile versions of web pages, the company adds.
Opera Mobile 10's interface is said to have been designed with both touchscreen and keypad-style phones in mind. Touchscreen phones get "even easier navigation with our new adaptive zoom feature, kinetic scrolling, and visual tab thumbnails," according to the company. On keypad phones, it's said, navigation has been optimized with a virtual mouse cursor, a box that highlights a zoomed-in area, and a variety of shortcut keys.
Background
Opera Software announced its previous Opera Mobile 9.7 in March 2009, then showed it off to carriers during April's CTIA Wireless conference in Las Vegas, releasing a public beta version in June. A key, consumer-friendly feature of the new release was said to be its improved support for Adobe Flash, but at the time, a Flash plug-in was not included.
Opera Mobile 9.7 was said to add improved support for AJAX and other web standards, passing the ACID3 test with a 100 percent score. The browser also supported the Open GL ES standard for graphics acceleration, according to the company.
In 2008, Opera Software and Nvidia also announced plans to collaborate on a version of Opera Mobile the companies claimed would deliver higher performance and lower battery consumption on devices using the chipmaker's ARM11-based SoCs. Devices using the Tegra processors and an "optimized" Opera Mobile were expected to ship last year, but have yet to appear, as far as we're aware.
As we've recently reported, Opera Software also offers Windows Mobile users a different browser, Opera Mini 5, which used to require a JVM (Java virtual machine) but now runs natively. Featuring a user interface and features (with the apparent exception of Flash) that are similar to Opera Mobile 10, Opera Mini 5 apparently differs in that it is designed to load pages through proxy servers that translate web pages into OBML (Opera Binary Markup Language) before sending them to a phone. This is said to reduce the amount of data transferred and lessen the strain on a phone's CPU.
Further information
Opera Mobile 10 for Windows Mobile is downloadable now for free from the company's website, here.
