In the beginning of this month Opera announced the new Opera Mobile 9.5 version of it’s mobile browser.

I had a possibility to chat with Opera reps during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona about the new browser and the thinking that’s gone into developing it.

It looks like the development of this version was heavily influenced by the iPhone Safari browser and super convenient full HTML mobile browsing experience that came with it.

With 9.5, Opera tried to bring this convenience to the rest of us. And with the features like tabbed browsing, zooming, panning, page overview, responsiveness to touch and other features, it looks like they have succeeded and made Opera experience even better then Safari.

Here’s short video demo of the main Opera Mobile 9.5 features:

And here’s full list of Opera Mobile 9.5 features:

• Intuitive user interface
• Tabbed browsing
• Improved text wrap
• Page overview, zooming and panning
• Landscape mode
• Save Web page for future offline access
• Call phone number from Web page
• Send link as SMS/MMS
• Send image as SMS/MMS
• Small Screen Rendering™
• Password manager
• Web address input auto-completion
• History and bookmarks
• Copy text
• Opera Widgets

Looks really impressive. Public beta should be out as summer approaches, and I surely will be checking it out.