Opera 8 for WM 2003 Smartphones released

[Alexander Turcic]

Following several months of "technical preview," Opera Software announced today that its mobile Web browser officially supports Windows Mobile smartphones and is available for public download. Opera 8 for Windows Mobile claims to support all major Web standards, including CSS2, DOM 2 and Javascript. It also includes Opera's "Small Screen Rendering" (SSR) technology, which "intelligently reformats" web pages to fit within the tiny screens of handheld mobile devices. A Pocket PC version is in development, the company says. From the press release:

"Originally, we had not planned to make Opera available on the Windows Mobile platform, but users kept asking for it because they were disappointed with the far from satisfactory performance of the browser that came shipped on their devices," says Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. "We are very pleased to offer the speedy Opera Web experience to Windows Mobile Smartphone users, and we are certain that operators will enjoy added benefit as Opera on their subscribers' Smartphones will increase data traffic and offer compelling use-cases for these devices."