Opera Mobile 9.5 to compete with iPhone's Safari browser?

We've spotted a live video preview of the latest Opera Mobile 9.5 - a fast and feature-rich web browser for mobile devices that strives to snatch the iPhone's Safari browser title for best mobile browsing experience (for the record, we've just made up this title, ok?).

You can watch the live preview by Matthew Miller from ZDNet and judge for yourselves but it's worth pointing some of the highlights.

Opera seem to have done some great work on their Presto rendering engine - the web browser is fast and it offers pretty much the same fluid-like panning and scrolling as Apple iPhone. But you've got to remember that this demo is running on the HTC Advantage which not only packs a VGA resolution display but also has a fast 624MHz CPU and a dedicated ATi graphics chip.

Now as far as navigation is concerned you will notice the "double-tap-to-zoom-in-a-paragraph" trick that is also used by the iPhone's Safari web browser. But you might also notice that the use of the Opera Mobile 9.5 relies heavily on the use of a stylus, a tool that the GSMarena team is not really fond of.

Yet the Opera Mobile 9.5 offers so much more than the iPhone Safari - automatic fullscreen mode, copy and paste, sending hyperlinks to other people, saving images and downloading files. It can even store pages for offline viewing.

Overall the new Opera Mobile 9.5 sounds like a killer deal for Windows Mobile users who have been plagued by the inadequate Explorer Mobile browser way too long. We are so looking forward to getting our hands on that browser and testing it for ourselves.

By the way, in case you are interested, you can also check out the official Opera Mobile 9.5 walkthrough created by the Opera team themselves. It's funny how their presentation setup and even studio lighting resembles the Apple iPhone demos. Enjoy!