Opera Mobile 9.7 May Rock More Than Skyfire, Here is Why

We've done a ton of browser tests in the past to see which is best for your Windows Mobile device. At the end of the day, we always say that if you want the best rendering fidelity but don't mind waiting, Opera Mobile 9.5 is still your best bet, but if you want the fastest browser, Skyfire is the way to go.

Well, with Opera Mobile 9.7 which will be announced at CTIA, we may have the best of both worlds, plus more.

You see, Opera Mobile 9.7 will bring not only flash and AJAX support (there goes Skyfire's edge!) but it uses a "turbo" technology to compress part of the page on Opera's servers, and then push it down to your device. If this sounds like Skyfire and Opera Mini, it is indeed similar. See the Opera Turbo whitepaper. Going into the future, it looks like Opera Mobile will be a hybrid browser...bringing together both on-device and server-side compression and rendering. At this point in time, devices are just not powerful enough to be able to quickly render web pages on the device, and so some server-side work is needed.

To see video of this "turbo" rendering in action, click on.