Opera Mobile v10.3 Released (yes it does Flash)

Get psyched baby ’cause I got a fresh Opera Mobile build for you. There may be other subtle improvements but let me offer you what I noticed. Psyched? Let’s do this. It doesn’t crash as much as the last version and when you’re running a bunch of other programs, at least from my ten minutes of testing, they don’t crash because Opera’s running whereas the last one was underwhelming in that regard. When you’re reading a block of text whether by double tapping to it in regular view or scrolling down a blog in full screen mode, it seems to figure out the right grid to stick to when going up and down unless you slide more than a centimeter to the right or left, meaning you don’t have to slide your finger vertically as straight as possible to keep the screen aligned with the text you’re reading. Seems to render text pretty fast too. Not bad.

It does sort of do Flash (Flash Lite 3.1, disabled by default) which you can toggle in Settings > Advanced > Plug-ins but it does not appear to do Flash video clips, unless I’m not doing it right, and when there’s something in Flash on a page, whether it’s an advertisement or just a small button, you have to tap a play button in order to get it to grab the swf and display the Flash. Which I’d call a good thing, though a better thing if you could toggle that as well. It does a good job on Youtube and it appears to launch an external player but it works fairly seamlessly.

This may have been also true of recent versions, not sure, but when in Turbo mode, when you go to your favorite blogs and forums to which you’d want to stay logged in, even though with Turbo you’re going through a proxy server, the browser is able to keep you logged in as you’d otherwise be on a computer even after closing and reopening. Unlike the last one it does not stash a quickstart shortcut in windowsstartup which I appreciate. Also unlike the last release when typing in text anywhere, and no they didn’t fix the SIP pop-up on landscape (man I hate that), it doesn’t go so slowly anymore. If you’re into this sort of thing you can sync bookmarks with your computer’s Opera. Note, regular hotmail doesn’t work, gotta use hotmail.com/m. But you can use it to create a Gmail account instead which is what you should have done years ago.

General info and demo here, download from your phone at m.opera.com or grab it from my mirror.

Doug Simmons