Claiming to be 2.5x faster than Internet Explorer Mobile, Opera 9.5 has an improved rendering engine to better handle JavaScript- and Ajax-laden web pages. It can also serve web content directly to a phone's idle screen, which will either create some cool web-linked functionality, or allow cellphone operators to splash more branding onto their phones. Opera Widgets, and Opera Zoom and panning make it sound like the iPhone's UI, don't they?

Opera unleashes innovative technology in latest mobile Web browser — Opera Mobile 9.5

Faster speed, new interface and Opera Widgets bring users closer to a full desktop experience
Exclusive preview at Mobile World Congress 2008 (February 11-14, Barcelona)
Oslo, Norway and Barcelona, Spain — February 5, 2008
Opera Software, the only company that puts the Web on any device, today announced the commercial release of Opera Mobile 9.5 — the latest version of its award-winning Web browser for sophisticated feature phones and smartphones. Participants at the Mobile World Congress 2008 will be the first to experience the improved functionality of Opera Mobile 9.5.

According to high-tech market research firm, In-Stat, the smartphone market will grow at more than a 30% compound annual growth rate for the next five years globally, exceeding unit sales for laptops, as users experience significant value from their smartphones. Users are downloading more applications and generating higher usage as measured by average revenue per user (ARPU) for operators. The main driver that has fueled this growth is overall user experience on the mobile Web.

Built on Opera's unique core architecture, the Opera Mobile 9.5 desktop-like browsing experience has been enhanced with innovations such as zooming and panning that make it easier to navigate, load pages quicker and get users closer to the Web content and entertainment they want. With Opera Mobile 9.5, users can experience the real Web and interact with content exactly as they do on their PC.

Faster speed
The new version utilizes Opera's Presto rendering engine to achieve page load speeds comparable to a desktop experience. The Opera Presto engine was modified and improves browsing performance significantly by accelerating the handling of Web pages. It dramatically improves page responsiveness on pages with heavy use of languages such as JavaScript and Ajax, ensuring smooth, hassle-free browsing.

Compelling experience
Opera Mobile 9.5 includes numerous features aimed at elevating the mobile browsing experience. Not only is the user interface (UI) intuitive enough to master in minutes, Opera Mobile 9.5 introduces several new innovations that elevate the Internet experience on a handheld device. Users can take advantage of the intuitive Opera Zoom™ to dive into the page and get closer to the content they want. In addition, productivity tools like the ability to save pages for offline browsing, Web address auto complete and password manager help busy users make the most of their time.

Fully loaded
Web 2.0-enabled, Widget-ready and Flash support turn Opera Mobile 9.5 into a fully loaded browser allowing users to access all their favorite Web sites such as Facebook, MySpace and more. With Opera Mobile 9.5, OEMs and operators will have the capability to include Flash Lite 3, empowering their smartphone users with access to the full Web including the ability to watch videos on YouTube effortlessly. In addition, Opera Widgets, which are mini applications that allow content to be accessed easily from the device idle screen with just a few clicks, are included in the new edition — automatically engaging the user through ease of operation and meeting consumer demands for quick access to information.

New revenue sources, bigger brand
Opera Mobile 9.5's ability to serve Web content directly on the idle screen gets mobile OEMs or operators closer to users. By greatly reducing the number of clicks required to get to content, there is a real potential for operators to increase data revenue and user loyalty. In addition, access to the idle screen allows operators to place their brand strategically to interact dynamically with users. Opera Mobile 9.5 is everything that handset makers and operators have been trying to achieve for years.

"Opera Mobile is the result of Opera's unwavering commitment to a vision that puts a true Web experience in the hands of mobile users," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. "The improved functionality of Opera Mobile 9.5 and easy access to information has raised the bar on a more compelling mobile Web browsing experience and will further stimulate mobile Internet adoption."

The Opera Mobile 9.5 experience includes many of the innovations found in Opera's trend-setting desktop browser including:

Intuitive user interface
Tabbed browsing
Improved text wrap
Page overview, zooming and panning
Landscape mode
Save Web page for future offline access
Call phone number from Web page
Send link as SMS/MMS
Send image as SMS/MMS
Small Screen Rendering™
Password manager
Web address input auto-completion
History and bookmarks
Copy text
Opera Widgets
Opera Mobile is currently shipped on more than 100 million phones with many of the world's top mobile OEMs and operators such as HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, T-Mobile, and others.

Leading software platform provider, UIQ, has realized the potential of Opera's new mobile browser. "UIQ works with the world's leading mobile phone manufacturers to create the ultimate user experience. Our long-standing partnership with Opera has given users the ability to access all their favorite Web sites and services," says Mats Barvesten, EVP Product Planning and Product Management at UIQ Technology. "We look forward to introducing our upcoming handsets, featuring the groundbreaking Opera Mobile 9.5 browser."

Along with hands-on exposure to Opera Mobile 9.5, Mobile World Congress participants will also have the ability to experience Opera on a variety of devices: Opera Mobile on smartphones, free downloads of Opera Mini 4, improved Web browsing on gaming consoles and the ARCHOS Generation 5 Media players will be just a few of the exciting features of Opera's 2008 exhibit.

Mobile World Congress will be held on the 11th through the 14th of February in 2008 in Barcelona, Spain. Visit the Opera Booth in Hall 2, 2C76 or email conference@opera.com to book a meeting.

Platform Support and Availability
Opera Mobile 9.5 will be available on all major platforms including Symbian, Windows Mobile and Linux, as both a standalone browser and as a SDK. The public beta release of Opera Mobile 9.5 will be announced separately. For media inquiries, please contact julies@opera.com.

A video demonstration of Opera Mobile 9.5 is available on http://www.opera.com/b2b/solutions/mobile/video/

About Opera Software ASA
Opera Software ASA has redefined Web browsing for PCs, mobile phones and other networked devices. Opera's cross-platform Web browser technology is renowned for its performance, standards compliance and small size, while giving users a faster, safer and more dynamic online experience. Opera Software is headquartered in Oslo, Norway, with offices around the world. The company is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol OPERA. Learn more about Opera at http://www.opera.com.

With Soonr, you can view a bunch of doc types (over 40), including PDF, Word and Excel, but they're re-rendered onto the iPhone by Soonr instead of using the iPhone's default rendering (because it can't). There's Microsoft Outlook integration as well, and even Skype text and voice chat. The voice chat isn't quite free, since it uses the Skype-out dialing to hook your iPhone call into the Skype call, but for international calls it's probably much cheaper than actually dialing the number on your phone. [Soonr]

Download [Soonr]

[UPDATED]

Steve Jobs initially sold the iPhone as the Next Big Thing from Apple, just like the Macintosh was. The Macintosh really broke the mold. While not as groundbreaking, the iPhone is an intelligent and clean implementation of existing things. Really intelligent, really clean, like the Mac. Unlike the original Mac, however, developers won't have full access to its core features. Without them there won't be the equivalent of PageMaker, Photoshop, Word or Premiere in the iPhone, powerful applications taking full advantage of the unique capabilities of the hardware, the operating system and its frameworks.

Those applications spawned two revolutions: desktop publishing (including photo editing) and desktop video. It was the Mac and its third-party apps that brought radical changes that have deeply affected us, not the Mac alone.

On the iPhone, however, developers will be limited to developing Web applications based on AJAX, a set of Internet standards that make software like GMail, Google Maps or FaceBook possible. The iPhone is the real thing, a complete UNIX-to-go with stunning graphic classes, and developers will be limited to do stuff like this.

Mind you, AJAX is great for what it does on the Web today, but is limited. All we know is this, from the press release:

Developers can create Web 2.0 applications which look and behave just like the applications built into iPhone, and which can seamlessly access iPhone's services, including making a phone call, sending an email and displaying a location in Google Maps.

This is nothing new, however. We knew this from the very beginning because iPhone's Safari was already doing it. It's called auto-detection of phone numbers and addresses: you click on a phone or address in your web page and it gets passed by Safari to the operating system, which calls the number or shows the address in the Google Maps app. In other words, they are trying to sell us the same thing we already had when the iPhone was introduced and the same thing we already have in Mac OS X's Safari.

So unless they show something boomtastic in the sessions, this will not change. To see how powerful AJAX applications on the iPhone could be, a million questions will have to be answered this week. Questions like:

- Would I be able to access the iPhone databases from Safari and query them from my AJAX application? Looking at Jobs' stress on security, it doesn't look like this will be possible.

- Would I be able store data locally beyond cookies? Probably the same answer.

- How will these application perform over limited EDGE connections? Will I have to do a painful download for the whole app, instead of just the data?

- How will the connection limit the interactive possibilities?

- How is the access to iPhone's hardware? Would I be able to access iPhone's hardware to connect to an infrared scanner via Bluetooth and create an amazing sales or logistics application? How about Multitouch?

If AJAX is that good and the developers don't need an SDK, why has Apple built a dedicated Mail application or Google Maps software into the iPhone? Why not just reformat the CSS on the Web and open a special view to .Mac mail, Gmail or Google Maps made just for iPhone Safari users ?

Maybe because to do the cool stuff that iPhone's Maps do, you need to access all the cool Mac OS X classes that iPhones have.

Now, I'm sure that there will be great AJAX applications created for the iPhone, specially at the corporate level, like in the Keynote Demo. But what is important here is that we won't have sexy apps. This is what Apple needs to make the iPhone not just great, but huge. A true revolutionary product. Otherwise, we will keep asking where are we going to find the killer apps that made the Mac what is today; where is the next Delicious Library-equivalent for the iPhone; where are the games. Just think about those, as Apple stresses its relationship with EA and id software. There's a great potential for games in the iPhone, which with multi-touch could be a Nintendo DS 2.0 in the making. As Nintendo fans will tell you, a Flash game (which provides with even better flexibility than AJAX) is not a substitute for a real Wii game. And the next big games never come from the established big developers who may, at the end, be the only ones with access to the secret iPhone SDK at use in Apple.

So no SDK == no access to iPhone's cool frameworks == no revolutionary apps, no real new concepts coming from third-parties, no eye candy available for anyone but Apple and no possibility for some really crazy games that will fully exploit the graphic and multi-touch power of the iPhone.

In other words

–Jesus Diaz

[12:37AM 6/12/07, Edited by B.Lam.]

Update 10:00AM PST 6/12/07 Think Secret is speculating that, with full support for Google Apps in Safari 3, the iPhone may also have access to Google Docs and Spreadsheets. Many will say that this solves one of the main concerns about the iPhone's viability as a business platform, despite the lack of an SDK to make specialized applications.

However, and even assuming that these could be viable alternatives to potential users looking for both complete Word and Excel viewing and light editing, Google Apps are hardly the killer applications I am talking about in this article. They are just current (and blah) productivity software that will not take advantage of the iPhone's unique features. –Jesus Diaz

Product Page [YouOS via MicroPersuasion]