Opera, the well respected web software company, have released the latest version of their browser for mobile phones, Opera Mobile 10 beta. The browser is currently available for Nokia smartphones and Windows Mobile phones.

I downloaded and installed the Windows Mobile version of the browser and it is a very impressive piece of software. Windows Mobile has been crying out for a fully featured browser to compete with the iPhone and Android for a while now and Opera Mobile 10 beta is, almost, the answer.

Pages render very quickly and zooming in and out and scrolling around a web page is super smooth. The multi-tab interface is especially slick, making it easy to jump between several open web pages. Opera Mobile 10 beta handles rich online web applications like Facebook and Gmail very well, with the websites looking and acting just as they would on a PC. There are, however, several annoyances, which is only to be expected from software badged as 'beta'.

First of all, there seems to be no way to stop Opera becoming your default browser. Previous versions had a tick box to check in the options screen, if you did want it to be the default browser, but this is now missing.

This is a test and example for posting images to your blog and Twitter from a Windows Mobile phone. (It's also a photo of a wonderful beach in Donegal.)