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.

Opera takes up the entire screen which means there is no on-screen way to access the Windows start button to get to other programmes and there is no way to minimise it, only an exit option. I found the text size rather small on the default setting, but once set to 120% it becomes much more readable.

Also, there is no homepage option. Opera Mobile 10 will always start up on the 'quick dial' screen, which is a handy link to your favourite websites, but it would be nice to be able to have a homepage instead. There's no Flash support, but then that's the norm these days. Going directly to Google Calendar kept on redirecting me to the mobile version, rather than the full version that Opera is capable of rendering. Clicking on the calendar link from within Gmail seems to have sorted this out, strangely enough, and I can now view Google Calendar in all its glory.

Only minor gripes really, and probably things that will have been sorted out by the time the browser comes out of beta.

Opera Mobile 10 beta screenshots