Following on from last month’s beta 2 release, Opera has announced the final release of Opera Mobile 10.1, a native web browser for Symbian. Since the beta release, there’s been a further update to the javascript speed increase – now up to nine times faster than Opera 10.0. Along with the server side compression, geo-location plug-in, and their rendering engine, the Opera browser continues to be one of the leading Symbian applications. More, and links, below...

While it is no longer the only Opera browser that is coded in native C++ (Opera Mini has recently joined the native ranks), Opera 10 is still regarded as a “full” browser, doing all most of the rendering and work of a web page on your smartphone, while Opera Mini goes via an Opera Proxy that does all the work. There are advantages to both approaches, so it’s nice to have the choice.

As Opera puts it, the main benefits of the Mobile browser are:

• Pioneering features from Opera — such as Speed Dial, tabbed browsing, Opera Link and password manager — reduce the time and typing required to navigate your favorite websites.
• When slow network speeds put the brakes on your browsing, gear up with Opera Turbo compression. Opera servers shrink web pages to as little as 20 percent of their original size, reducing your data costs and turbo-charging your browsing speed.
• Opera Mobile fine-tunes the look and feel of your browsing with kinetic scrolling, a virtual keyboard and auto-rotation to landscape.

You can download the browser direct on your smartphone by visiting m.opera.com, or find out more about the new browser from their Press Release.