Opera Mobile for Android coming soon

Opera has announced on its blog that Opera Mobile is coming to Android within a month. Among the new features is having hardware acceleration for speedy response and pinch to zoom.

If you’ve been using Opera on your android device, that is actually Opera Mini which is different from Opera Mobile. Opera Mini is a lightweight browser that relies on external servers to compress and deliver web content to your phone. This makes it appealing for lightweight mobile device and slow connections like GPRS or EDGE. In other words, the actual web engine is done off site and not on your phone. This compromises on usability as what you see is an post-compressed product of the real web.

For more powerful smartphones and adequate 3G speeds, that’s where Opera Mobile comes in. It has a real web browser engine and takes full advantage of the power on your phone.

Based on our past experience with Opera, we’re confident that it would do a better job than FireFox Mobile. We can’t wait to try it out when it goes live on Android Market.

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