Opera Mobile 9.7 goes live

6:05 AM Edited by Blony

. Opera Mobile, already considered by many to be the premier browsing platform for WinMo handsets, has just benefited from a big boost today in the form of version 9.7. The headline here is that 9.7 is the first version to employ Opera's Opera Turbo technology, which offloads pages to Opera's servers (in much the same way as Opera Mini) where they get compressed to tiny fractions of their original sizes before being sent down to the phone. A demo on Opera's site shows the tech in action (using an EDGE connection for added drama), and if the claims hold up, Turbo should clearly make a noticeable difference in end user browsing speed. Next up, 9.7 upgrades to the Presto 2.2 rendering engine, which is exactly the same engine used by Opera's desktop browsers and is said to offer up to a 25 percent boost in rendering speed over previous versions. Anyhow, Opera Mobile 9.7 is available now for your WinMo phone -- much to Internet Explorer Mobile's chagrin, we imagine.