Opera, best known for its light weight browsers on desktop and mobile platforms have recently added another feather in their cap with the release of Opera Mobile 10 beta 3. Yeah, we know it’s still in it’s beta 3, but the inclusion of Flash in this version, makes it all the more exciting in the war of the browsers in the symbian domain.

The last time we covered browsers from Opera, we included both the java based Opera Mini and the stand-alone browser or as AAS puts it “natively coded” Opera Mobile in our review, last year, when the beta 2s were out. More than two months down the line, Opera Mobile has been update to beta 3, while the mini is still in beta 2. Look’s like the Oracle buy out of Sun (developers of Java) is starting to have an impact on java based products! Nevertheless, let’s find out how the beta 3 of Opera Mobile fares on our 5800s, after the break though.

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Our first impression of the latest version of the browser was rather encouraging with noticeably faster loading times and transitions between different tabs. However, we were let down with the flash rendering. We were actually looking forward to smooth flash performance here but all we got was a disappointing “Connecting” hang-screen in the Real Media player when we tried to access YouTube videos.

Our repeated attempts at accessing flash content was a failure and hence we couldn’t really test flash streaming on this version of the browser. If any of you are able to please let us know. We did find out that the WinMo version of the browser does handle flash but rather disappointingly as observed by FavBrowser.com.

In absence of flash, web browsing is rather incomplete and though Opera Mobile 10 has some amazing features like the Opera Link and Download Manager, we would still stick with Skyfire for it’s flash support. But being still in its beta 3, we expect Opera Mobile 10 to grow by leaps and bounds as and when the final version is released.

Till then, do get the feel of the latest mobile browser from Opera by pointing your mobile browser to http://m.opera.com/mobile

UPDATE:
A quick look at the Opera Blog reveals that Flash lite support is experimental and is only released on the WinMo platform as of now. No wonder we kept running all over the place trying to get the YouTube stream on our 5800s.

Related posts:

1. Opera Updates Mini 5 and Mobile 10 to Beta 2
2. Opera Mobile 10 Beta Released for S60, Looks Impressive
3. Opera Releases Opera Mini 5 Beta- Adds Tabbed Browsing