The company
announced last August that it was porting the Opera smartphone browser to Windows Mobile. In mid-October, Opera quietly put out a "silent TP," which is said to have been downloaded more than 43,000 times.
Small-screen renderingMost web pages are designed for displays at least 800 pixels wide, according to Opera. The Opera smartphone browser's SSR technology identifies the web page's content and adapts elements individually to fit on smaller screens, leaving original fonts, colors, design, and style "virtually untouched," as shown below, according to Opera.
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)
AvailabilityAccording to Opera, today's release supports all Microsoft Smartphone 2003 devices, and can be downloaded
here. Opera says the TP release is intended for preview purposes only, and that the final product and it does not contain all of the features that are expected to be present in the final release. The TP release will expire on March 31, 2005, and users will not be able to register it.
"We want to show Smartphone users what Opera is capable of right away," said Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner. "We have released a TP for our development on the Windows Mobile platform, so that we can expand testing and get feedback on user experiences."
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