“In our own research, we have learned that the number-one reason people use Opera Mini is because it is easy — easy to use the Web you know. The idea of navigating the vastness of the Web from such a small screen can be a daunting leap, which is why we have long committed to make the browsing experience you are familiar with from your PC, easy to do on your mobile phone,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. “With new, sleek navigation buttons, tabbed browsing and Speed Dial bookmarks, you are never more than a click away from where you want to go on the Web.”

List of new features:

• Tabbed browsing - Allow users to browser several sites simultaneously.
• Touchscreen or keypad browsing
• Password manager
• Speed Dial

Check out the demonstration video below:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Check the change log below of the version 1.1.0.13041 for Symbian and version 1.1.0.13052 for Windows Mobile

• Improved page load times.
• Improved scrolling and zooming on Symbian.
• Improved reconnect. Skyfire will show clearly when you can start interacting with the web page in case it previously timed out and disconnected (to save battery life).
• WML support. If you are browsing to mobile sites that use the old mobile WML markup, you can now view the content.
• Improved mobile website support.
• Page up/down navigation via short-key: You can use now ‘2’ and ‘8’ to easily navigate one page up or down. Great for reading articles. Now the short-key for invoking the Superbar is *.
• Updated Plug-ins: For Flash, Silverlight and QuickTime we have the newest versions to give you more compatibility with more sites.
• Skyfire quits on startup on Windows Mobile 6.5 devices: It affected a limited number of 6.0 and 6.1 devices as well. (Fixed Issue 7369)
• Multi-line text entry behavior on Symbian: This was an issue when you exited text entry mode with predictive text on, or used the navigation keys. (Fixed Issues 7149 & 7112)
• Superbar state on Symbian: Cancel button did not always exit from Superbar. (Fixed Issue 7156)
• Samsung Propel and Jack (AT&T): Could not uninstall Skyfire if the SIM card was missing. Fixed.
• Short-keys inconsistent on non-standard keyboard. On some keyboard layouts (half-qwerty, dual keyboards), the short-keys do not work as expected. (Issue 7498, 7408, 7581)

You can grab a copy here: http://www.opera.com/mobile/download/ . Note that the Opera Mobile 9.7 is in its beta1, full flash support is not available yet and expect to see bugs and errors. Make sure you go through the list below

9.7 beta known issues

Browser

• Opera Turbo in Opera Mobile is still a preview-feature;
  • Downloads don’t work while Opera Turbo is enabled.
  • Some settings (such as toggle on/off images) do not apply when Opera Turbo is enabled.
• On older WM 5.0 Devices with 480×800 resolution, switching between portrait and landscape may cause display errors. This is due to lack of support for this resolution in early versions of Microsoft’s driver.
• Some input method editors are known not to work well with Opera because they do not comply with Microsoft’s SIP and/or IME standard. When such an editor is detected by Opera, Opera will use a known (default) input method instead. An exception is EzInput v1.5, where the phone keypad and compact QUERTY, ABC mode doesn’t work, but the rest of the modes work fine. We recommend upgrading to EzInput v2.0 to avoid this.
• Only support for FlashLite 3.x. No Flash plugin included.

Widget manager add-on

• The Widget manager is an add-on to the browser, so the browser must be installed in order for the widget manager to work.
• We recommend disabling Opera Turbo in the browser when using the widget manager.
• Rotating widgets does not work properly. Portrait mode should be used when running widgets.
• Widgets + Plugins (Flash & Gears) don’t work.
• Clicking internal links in a widget will launch the browser.
• Twitter widget might have login problems on first run. If this happens, just close the Twitter widget (X) and open it again.

Having previously delivered rich media and text readability on a small screen, the focus of this latest release was helping users get to the content they want more quickly. As the new version starts-up, users can type a search or URL in the Superbar
even while Skyfire is connecting in the network. After a web page loads, smooth scrolling and zooming – similar to an iPhone – helps users navigate the page more quickly. Likewise, now users can click on links on the first page load without having to zoom first.

Skyfire runs on more than 70% of the worldwide installed base of smartphones, based on figures from a March 2009 Gartner report. These include smartphone devices made by HTC, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Palm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, TMobile, to name a few, and newer models with VGA and WVGA screen resolutions all running on Windows Mobile or Symbian platforms.

Skyfire has plans to bring their browser to more smartphones and recently launched a Private Closed Alpha program for the BlackBerry platform. The company will announce plans for a Public BlackBerry Beta at a later date.

“As the most popular mobile browser on the planet, Opera Mini will also be available to users of Yahoo! Mobile. Yahoo! Mobile with Opera Mini is easily accessible to end-users, operators and manufacturers and provides a cost-effective means of getting the Internet on your phone,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. “Together, Yahoo! and Opera will bring the full Web experience to your phone, similar to how you know it from your desktop computer.”

Earlier this week, Vodafone has also announced to use a custimized Opera Mini for its java enabled mobile phone

Vodafone customers will benefit from the ability to enjoy the full web-browsing functionality on Java mobile phones as well as an icon-based display that is easy to personalise. In addition, customers will be able to take advantage of an easy zoom in and out feature which automatically fits the mobile screen and on selected handsets the ability to view video content from popular sites such as YouTube.

As part of the global framework agreement with Opera Software, selected Vodafone operating companies will be able to pre-embed the Vodafone version of the Opera Mini browser on Java-based portfolio handsets or encourage customers to download it themselves.

“We went out the door delivering rich media – whether it was video, images, or audio – Skyfire delivered it to your phone just like your PC browser.” said Tracy DeMiroz, Skyfire VP of Marketing. “In this release of Skyfire, we concentrated on
improving the experience of reading text in Skyfire. The strides we made now give our users the best of both experiences whether they are watching a show on Hulu or reading an article in the New York Times.”

Skyfire 0.9 supports all popular Windows Mobile screen resolutions including WVGA and WQVGA, which means Skyfire runs on new popular Windows Mobile phones such as the Samsung Omnia and Sony Ericsson XPERIA X1. In addition, the Skyfire Symbian client for Nokia E and N Series phones has been  much improved. Significantly reduced files sizes and improved installation makes for a simplified experience.

[via wmexperts]

Google book search for mobile can now be accessed at http://books.google.com/m with your mobile browser