Opera Mobile 10.1 lands 'Carakan' engine on Symbian
As the web's most valuable secret reaches 76 million users
Opera has officially released its Opera Mobile 10.1 browser for Symbian, offering Nokia S60 users the "Carakan" JavaScript engine that drives the Norwegians' latest desktop browser.
According to Opera, the new browser outperforms Opera Mobile 10.0 for Symbian by nine times on the Sunspider Javascript benchmark.
Opera has also added geolocation hooks, letting web services provide customized content based on where you are in the world. And naturally, you get familiar Opera tools such as Speed Dial, tabbed browsing, Opera Link, and the company's password manager – not to mention the option of flipping on Opera Turbo, which uses proxies to compress wbesites before they're sent down to the phone.
The new browser runs on smartphones based on Symbian^3 and the Symbian S60 third and fifth editions. You can download it at m.opera.com.
Meanwhile, the Norwegians have announced that their other mobile browse – Opera Mini, which built around Opera Turbo – now has over 76.3 million users, a 7.1 per cent increase from September 2010 and a 92 per cent increase from October 2009. Last month, Opera Mini users viewed over 41.6 billion pages, a 12.6 per cent increase from September 2010 and a 142 per cent increase from October 2009.
The web's most valuable secret continues to grow. ®
COMMENTS
money, money, money
They are making money just like the desktop version: Every time you use the search field, Google pays Opera.
Also, they can move users from the public Opera Mini versions, and onto versions customized for operators, and then the operator will pay per active user.
Moneymaking...
From the article linked to (in this article):
"Today Opera's income comes from three streams: licensing and royalties in one stream, income from active users and transactions in another stream, and "internet economy" income such as driving referrals to search engines as a third. The latter, by the way, is what keeps Mozilla afloat. So mobile networks pay to use Opera's server technology because it saves them bandwidth, and improves the end-user experience."
I have played with it for a few minutes...
... and it certainly feels a lot snappier than 10.0 (not that 10.0 was a slouch).
Windows Mobile?
Since Opera Mobile is the browser that made Windows Mobile a viable smartphone platform, I hope we can see the same bump from 10 to 10.1, and a similar performance improvement, before too long! It seems to be on 10.0 still at the moment.
