Opera has announced the launch of Opera Mobile 9.5, its web browser for advanced mobile phones and smartphones. With this new version, Opera aims to bring the desktop web experience to mobile devices through a set of new features:

• Presto — Opera Mobile’s rendering engine, completely rewritten from the ground up with a single goal: speed.
• Futhark — a new JavaScript engine that will also be included in the next version of its desktop browser, Opera 10.
• Widgets — multi-purpose, multi-platform mini-applications that can do all sorts of things.
• Small Screen Rendering — lets you view full pages on the often tiny screens of mobile phones, with the ability to zoom in, zoom out, or pan to specific sections of the page. This technology is already available in other browsers like Safari Mobile and the upcoming SkyFire, and stands as a key technology in the future of the mobile web.
• Flash Lite 3 and AJAX support — we’ll finally be able to visit sites like YouTube to watch our favourite videos and use cutting-edge Web 2.0 technologies.
• Portrait and landscape view, a download manager, copy and paste, sending images and links via SMS/MMS, a password manager, tabbed browsing, an intuitive interface… these are other features that also deserve a mention.

This same week, during Mobile World Congress 2008, the Opera team will be giving an exclusive demo of their new browser — so if you’re in Barcelona these days, make sure you swing by! (And fill us in afterwards.)

By the way, the Guided Tour is very impressive — though I still find Apple’s tours more compelling, for some reason.