Opera Mobile 9.7 is considered a magic box by many: features like 3D-accelerated scrolling, a powerful proxy in the backend and a variety of other options should theoretically give all other devices a run for their money. But can it really stack up?
Installing the program takes a few minutes – in case you already had Opera on your box, you will then find a total of two icons:
The new browser has a different start-up animation:
And furthermore has a different theme:
A zoom slider is finally available for comfortable zooming: the dreaded grey checkerboard now pops up a lot less:
Unfortunately, the rendering engine still has some eekers which were not present in 9.5 – the image below shows our sister site TamsPalm:
Surprisingly, Opera Mobile 9.5 gets it done without any eekers:
The status bar at the bottom is now a lot wider, which wastes screen real estate:
Closing tabs can no longer be done via a button at the top – it now requires two clicks:
Opera Mobile 9.7 furthermore does away with the highly annoying XML errors (ridiculed here) – which means that web sites like The Daily WTF can now be accessed easily…
In the end, the browser feels a lot faster than its predecessor…but can not stack up fully due to its horrible handling and rendering engine eekers. If Opera manages to get the rendering back in line, this could well be their next bestseller…
P.S. Stay tuned – SunSpider benchmark test reports follow shortly…
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