By I’ve never really been known to make much noise over a feature like pinch-to-zoom – double tapping with my freakishly-long nails and fat fingers does the job just fine for me – but Opera’s about to change that with the release of Opera Mobile 10.1 (the public beta should be coming sometime this month.) Robin Wauters of TechCrunch recently sat down with Opera’s Phillip Gronvold to take a first look at the consumer version of the software. (Previously, Opera Mobile was only accessible by OEMs, with their Mini offering currently in the Android market holding users over.)
If you haven’t heard, Opera Mobile 10.1 for Android will be the first browser to take advantage of hardware acceleration features to make for a smoother browsing experience. The only problem I see with that is – judging by this build being shown without hardware acceleration on the Samsung Galaxy S – it already looks ridiculously speedy. I can’t imagine the kind of performance we’ll be getting out of this thing once they fully implement those features.
Pinch-to-zoom in this demo looked as smooth as you can get on an Android device – rivaling that of the iPhone and iPad’s performance – and scrolling through pages looked like it was a breeze too. With acceleration, I think Opera Mobile will win over a lot of people once we’re finally able to download it. Check out the video at TechCrunch.
i’ll be giving it a try but so far, stock browser has been the most comfortable for me
Did he say iphone 5 around 6:40?
I use Opera mini for Android and I have the same doubt. The zooming on my HTC Hero is incredible fast compared to any other browser. It can’t get faster.
Anyways, my Hero is old and I guess would not take advantage of the hardware acceleration. I’m happy with its current speed though.
Wow that looks extremely nice :)
It looks good :)
@Aztec Yes, he did.
@Theo Thanks just had to be sure.
@Aztec he says platform, not 5
Why does everyone make a big deal about pinch to zoom, that is on the stock browser and every other browser I have tried, it really isn’t a big deal anymore.
Looks nice though, I may give it a shot after it is on the market, Dolphin HD is going to be tough to beat though
I’m happy with the stock browser on my Fascinate so I don’t really see a need to d/l Opera, Dolphin or anything else. Personally I love pinch to zoom. Even with a 4″ screen, it’s nice to zoom in so I don’t have to strain my eyes to read a web page.
hopefully it renders pages better than opera mini or at least as good as the stock browser, and what about the flash support ?!
Looks great. Hopefully I can get my hands (fingers) on the public beta.
Still have to give love to Opera Mini though. It’s data compression is a life saver when I don’t have 3G and I need to browse the web a bit.
And no, he didn’t say ‘iPhone 5’. He said ‘iPhone Platform’.
I’ll give it a try, but I may stick with Opera Mini. Like Krynj said, the compression can’t be beat for speed. Combined with HSPA+(7.2) I load pages like lightning.
wicked :)
To me pinch to zoom is useless unless it automatically reformats the text and i didn’t see that happening with opera, which is a pity. Also they don’t say if they will support flash in the browser.
No big deal.. My galaxy s stock browser has amazingly fast pinch to zoom.. I think is kind of an abuse to compare opera’s pinch to zoom with iphones since galaxy s can perform great with stock browser..
@My Hero,
I really don’t like it when pinch to zoom reformats the text at all. When I zoom in I know what part of the page I want to see, I don’t want the browser to make any decisions about how I should see it.
Author, please word thing better. Can you say “the only problem I see with that is,” and then go on to say something positive without a contradiction? What exactly was a problem and where was it? Problems are bad things not good things they’re bad things. That’s why they are caused problems.
Reformatting is the best damn thing….and wtf is about pinch to zoom..so does the built in browser.
With hardware acceleration i think it will be a battery life bbq. Most of the apps utilizing hardware acceleration will send you for a charger really quick.
opera doesn`t support flash on my nexus one , but it is much faster than the native browser of the nexus one!