Exclusive Video: Opera 9.5 Mobile Tour

Here’s my video walk-through of an early Opera Mobile v9.5 Beta. There are some significant design flaws with this program, most notably the removal of the Windows Mobile bottom bar with softkey menus. This makes it impossible to use the browser with the highly efficient keyboard shortcuts found in the rest of Windows Mobile. Instead you have a series of “mystery meat” icons that require a stylus to actuate (and documentation to understand). So if you’re used to navigating your device with just the keyboard, Opera will likely prove frustrating to use. This seems unlikely to be fixed in the final version since their promotional material still shows the “mystery meat” toolbar. That will likely be a deal-breaker for Treo users.

Opera has a lot of other great features however. I love the predictive URL auto-complete in the address bar. The zooming and fit-to-page features still need some refinements in order to be usable. The context sensitive menu for copying and re-using content is excellent.