Without Hardware Acceleration, Pinch-to-Zoom on Opera Mobile is Beautiful
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.