It looks like the smartphone browser war is beginning to hot up; mere hours after I wrote about Ed Hardy’s glowing review of the Skyfire browser, Opera have unleashed version 9.5 of their Opera Mobile software, complete with a new rendering engine, compatibility with Flash and other Web 2.0 gubbins, and a Safari-mimicking “Opera Zoom” to better display text on a smartphone’s small screen.

Opera Mobile 9.5 also introduces Widget support, each a mini-application intended to sit on the handset’s home screen, as well as tabbed browsing, integration with SMS/MMS/email to send links and images directly from the webpage, landscape viewing, form auto-completion and a password manager. 

The software will be available as both a standalone browser and as an SDK for “all major platforms” including Windows Mobile, Symbian and Linux, and there will be a public beta available sometime in the near future.

[via ZDNet]