Hot on the heels of last week's announcement regarding the launch of Opera Mobile 10.1 for the Symbian S60 operating system, comes a new announcement from Norwegian software giant Opera, regarding the availability of a Opera Mobile 10.1 beta flavor of the browser for the Maemo platform. The owners of a Nokia N900 or a N810/N800 device can now download and install the solution on their handsets, while enjoying one of the fastest such solutions released for them.

“The previous labs release for Maemo was the first time Carakan, our new Javascript engine, was released on a mobile device. However, JIT support was not ready for that release, which meant that it was not as fast as we wanted it to be. Luckily our Javascript gurus have been working hard on JIT support for ARM CPUs, which means that we are finally able to offer JIT support. This makes Opera Mobile 10.1 beta the browser with the fastest Javascript engine on the Maemo platform,” Opera states on its Opera Labs website.

A nice range of enhancements have been packed inside the new release, including support for Geolocation, which offers sites the possibility to use the Geolocation API to learn where a user is located so as to offer relevant information. Of course, users would be asked to give permission for sites to take advantage of this feature. Other features of the solution include JIT support for the Javascript engine, improved support for popup windows, or power management support. The release comes with a series of bug fixes too, such as the fact that no more extra new tabs opened when the browser is set as default.

However, some known issues are also present with the solution, including: - Geolocation may not always update using the most precise source (most commonly, this means it will update using cell tower data instead of GPS) - Adobe Flash and other plugins are not supported - Screen tearing may be visible when panning, especially in portrait mode - The built-in on-screen keyboard is not supported, use the physical keyboard or the on-screen keyboard included with Opera Mobile - The new panning algorithm is not optimized with regards to page rendering - Panning may sometimes move at much higher speeds than expected

In case users have had Opera Mobile previously installed on their device, the solution should update automatically via the Application Manager. Those who didn't try the browser on their Maemo devices can download it from Softpedia too, via this link.