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The turbo functionality used here is actually the same system that previously appeared in the desktop Opera 10 beta and Opera says that its best used on connections that are slower than 3G. When turbo mode is switched on page requests from the phone are intercepted by Opera's own proxy servers. These servers then fetch the data from the site, render it and send a compressed version of this render back to your phone. Because the page is so heavily compressed much less data needs to be transferred between the proxy server and your handset. Therefore, complex and image heavy sites can be displayed much faster than they would if the phone was trying to pull down all the raw data for the site over it's slow connection.

In our experience, the turbo mode works well and gives you a very noticeable improvement in browsing speed on slower links. However, there are a couple of trade-offs you have to put up when it's turned on. First, because the proxy servers do some serious compression on images after they've rendered the pages, pictures do come out looking a bit worse for wear. And while this heavy-handed image compression is fine for a while, we wouldn't like to have to put up with it all the time. The other reason why you won't want to just keep the turbo mode turned on all the time is that it introduces a noticeable amount of lag between clicking on a page and it actually appearing on your phone's screen. This is why it's best to turn off turbo mode when you're working with faster links like 3G or Wi-Fi.

Opera's plan for the further is that the turbo mode will automatically switch itself on and off as it detects changes in the available bandwidth on a link. So if you're using a 3G phone to browse pages while you're on a train and the link is switching between 3G and EDGE speeds, the browser will recognise when the speed has dropped, switch on turbo mode and then switch it off again as the link quality goes back up to 3G data rates. This sounds like a really clever and useful feature but unfortunately, it's not implemented in this release so you're left having to manually switch turbo mode on and off. As the switch is easily accessible via the settings menu it's not a great sacrifice, but obviously having the browser do it automatically would be a huge boon.

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