Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon minimun from pocketnow.com and this is a look at upper mobile 10 beta which was just released this is an update to upper mobile 9.5 which is really the flagship browser for Windows Mobile that comes pre-installed on a lot of devices especially those from HTC it really beats out internet explorer Mobile in terms of rendering fidelity speed and some other features and now version 10 really tries to build on that with a lot of new features so let's take a look at how it works it is a beta so it's a little bit buggy you probably want to run this in parallel to another browser like opera mobile 9.5 Skyfire or whatever other browser you use because it's not completely stable and let's start it up first thing you'll notice that it starts up in about two or three seconds Opera Mobile 9.5 starts up in about five six seconds which may seem like an eternity you're trying to quickly get to a website so right off the bat here we have a panel of six websites that you can add to that you go to on a regular basis kind of like Google Chrome so we can tap the plus button we can select from our favorites or we can just type in address and manually and then it will ask you if you want to add a thumbnail and then it'll try to pull from the website a small little thumbnail although this is Google it didn't come out so so nice hopefully when it comes out of beta you will see a nicer thumbnail so let's go through some of the features let's first start by loading up a web page and let me check if opera turbo is turned on we're gonna go through this screen in a second it is turned on let me turn it off just so you can compare we're over Wi-Fi right now and I'm gonna go to pocketnow.com now because this is not a native application it doesn't tap into the accelerometer so we don't get to have landscape pages also this is running on the hd2 right now we don't have pinch-to-zoom Opera Mobile 9.7 was built specifically for the HD 2 and it was integrated so well that pinch-to-zoom worked but not the case in 10 so we have this load pretty darn fast actually like I said we can't pinch to zoom but we can double tap to zoom in it goes in really fast looks like it's trying to load something right now and what's really interesting about opera mobile 10 is that you don't get the checkerboard pattern anymore like you would in 9.5 so let's kind of get around on the screen a little bit and see what it looks like to to move around and let's click on a link all right and here it comes that was about seven seconds and we can scroll down it doesn't support flash of course we can DoubleTap the zoom in but note how opera mobile ten kind of formats the page weird this text should flow all the way to the side here but it only goes to the left side of the column that's probably a bug with the beta it kind of keeps the text shrunken over here so to zoom in as you just saw when you double tap to zoom out you press this button down here oddly double tapping again doesn't zoom out so you have to press the button down here it's not too big of a deal let's open up a new tab opera mobile ten now has a really cool way to manage tabs you can press the plus button right here and let's go to actually let's just go to Wikipedia that's an easy one and here is Wikipedia that was about seven or eight seconds and now we can kind of pen between pocket now and Wikipedia we can actually see a little preview without actually going directly into the website then you tap again to get the tab panel to go down really cool design let's open up in another website and see how it does when there are multiple sites open let's open up and gadget and we'll go to the full site okay so that was pretty quick and again notice how the text is kind of formatted strangely I'm gonna flick really fast down the page and you're gonna notice that it really redraws the screen almost instantly it doesn't even look like it's redrawing it it's just there and we can double tap to zoom in we can pan around on the screen very nice and we can tap on a headline to go to the next page and that came through quite fast but again the formatting is very very much off here so we're gonna zoom out and let's see how these multiple websites do how fast they come up pretty fast and you get this nice animation down here so let's take a look at the settings that you can change in Opera Mobile 10 beta we can hit the wrench down here and we get some options we can find a word in a page which is kind of like pressing ctrl F on your keyboard in a desktop web browser you can check out the history go to bookmarks or in our case we're gonna go to settings not much you can change here you can have it load images turn on a portable turbo which we're going to do this use a server-side rendering to increase page load times kind of like sky fire doesn't work as well but it increases load times a little bit and full-screen mode and what you're going to see is that full screen mode nicely hides the top address bar and the bottom bar and you can hide it or bring it out again by pressing that button let's close the program and open it up again just so we know that opera turbo is indeed going to be on and then we'll try loading a site that we've already loaded before it see if it's faster really fast load time let me just confirm that we still have opera turbo on and we do so let's go to pocketnow.com now and see if there's any increase in page load time before it was about 10 seconds okay that was about eight seconds it's not completely done I think it's trying to load some additional page elements it was a little bit faster let's click on one link just to sort of just to sort of have a better indication and it's kind of lagging right now I'm here it comes with the patient we just clicked on and here it is a little bit faster but not really that significant I would probably leave opera turbo turned off so overall we like where operas going with Opera Mobile 10 we think it's a really good step up from nine point five once they work out the bugs it's really great how fast it turns on how there's no checkerboard now although sometimes you get white spots the interface has cleaned up the tab management is better just a step in the right direction we're really looking forward to future builds of this that take away some of these bugs that cause the program to freeze kind of on a regular basis when you use it depending on what device you use the program is free to try right now we'll put a link up on pocketnow.com to tell you how to get it we'd also like to see these rendering issues kind of fix themselves a little bit because they don't look quite right when you're zoomed out that's it for now