Opera Mobile is finally coming to Android. I’ve been waiting for this for quite a while now, for one reason alone: the UI. I believe Opera Mini has the best UI and the most polished one by far. It’s easy to use and it looks great. Opera Mobile will bring the same great UI, have the same functionality of a full browser, and also come with the compression technology that can save 80% of your data when activated.
But one feature I’m even more excited about is hardware acceleration. It’s not even in all the desktop browsers yet, including their own Opera browser, and they want to bring it to mobile. Hardware acceleration will represent the new battle between browsers, replacing the javascript battle. Hardware acceleration is so important for browsers, especially for mobile ones, because it can significantly improve their rendering speed.
This is very needed for a mobile browser which usually has 5-10x slower rendering speed than your browser on a PC. This is mostly because the CPU’s are slower and clocked less than a PC CPU, so if the GPU can help the mobile browser gain some speed, that’s great news.
I believe the stock browser in Gingerbread will also have some hardware acceleration support, though obviously it won’t be full since they don’t even have it in Chrome yet, but Opera’s support won’t be full either. This is still big news though, because now everyone can focus on bringing hardware acceleration not only to the desktop, but to mobile as well.
Wait for Opera Mobile to come out by the end of the month.