Opera Mobile V9.7 beta

The other big change with this release is to do with the implementation of widgets. In version 9.5 beta, the widget manager formed part of the main browser but for this release, Opera has completely stripped it out and made it a standalone application called the Widget Gallery.


This new Gallery is very easy to use as it simply presents a grid of boxes with large icons for each of the installed widgets. To add a new widget you simply click on the Plus icon in an empty box and the browser will fire up to take you to the widget download site. We're not quite sure why Opera has separated the Widget Gallery from the browser as to us it seems like a less elegant solution, but we guess it's at least partly to stop errant widgets from dragging down the browser when they misbehave. Furthermore, at present there seems to be some discrepancies between how different widget user interfaces behave, which makes the user experience a bit less uniform than it should.

There are many other issues with this release, as you would expect from an early beta. Although it had previously been hinted that this version would add support for Flash, sadly it hasn't made it into this release. Google Gears support is also noticeable by its absence. The other big issue is that this beta is limited to Windows Mobile devices with a touchscreen, so if you have a Windows Mobile Standard device, it's not for you. Still, the vast majority of WinMo handsets are now touchscreen devices so the audience for the beta should still be very large.


There are also some significant bugs yet to be ironed out. For example, when using it on the HTC Touch HD, if we switched from portrait to landscape view and back again the page formatting would sometimes get mucked up. Similarly, some pages that display fine on the 9.5 beta are broken on this version so obviously there's still a significant amount of tweaking needed on the rendering engine.

Although this version introduces some interesting new technologies that show the direction Opera is heading in the future, most people will be better off sticking with 9.5 beta for now. There's simply not enough of a jump in functionality to make it a worthwhile upgrade especially as the rendering engine is still quite buggy at present.