Coming soon: Opera Mobile 9.7

Today, Norwegian browser company Opera announced that Opera Mobile 9.7 will be premiering next week at CTIA Wireless. The cross-platform mobile browser will offer better standards support, and combine the Presto 2.2 rendering engine found in the Opera 10 desktop browser with a new server-side optimization technique the company calls Opera Turbo.

Opera Turbo compresses and accelerates full Web pages for improved browsing over limited-bandwidth connections. The technology opened in limited public testing just under two weeks ago, and can be applied to Opera's native browser products.

Because Turbo uses a technology called "Opera Web Optimization Proxy," which is different from the Opera Binary Markup Language used in Opera Mini, the acceleration technology will not available on Mini, which now has a userbase of 20.5 million. Opera says that Mobile 9.7 with Opera Turbo compresses data as much as 80%, and offloads page rendering enough to show marked speed improvements and performance even on devices with few resources to spare.