Three of the best mobile browsers that act like grown up ones are Mobile Safari, Skyfire and Opera Mobile 9.5. Even though the latter two (both for Windows Mobile) are still betas, Laptop Mag decided to toss them all into a race anyway, seeing which could deliver piping hot content the fastest. They ran Opera and Skyfire on an AT&T HTC Tilt, so everyone was surfing on the same 3G network with beefy hardware. Spoiler: Skyfire delivered pages in one third of the time it took Safari or Opera. It's because Skyfire cheats.

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Two days late, the first beta of Opera Mobile 9.5 is available right now. While it's a developer-focused release, 9.5's snappier response, overhauled UI and better standards support make it worth making the jump now, if you're just a little adventurous. [Opera]

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Since the desktop version of Opera 9.5 officially launched just a bit ago, you'd figure the mobile version would be close behind. You're right: Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta (for Windows Mobile) goes live July 15. It'll bring a lot of the desktop version's features down to your smartphone, including the same browser engine. Enjoy your few weeks left to gloat, HTC Touch Diamond owners. [Opera via via Phone Scoop]

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Ever since Steve Jobs showed the speedy new iPhone 3G in a browser faceoff against the Nokia N95 at WWDC, users on Howard Forums have been crying foul. They say His Steveness's test of loading the National Geographic homepage was bogus because the N95's browser uses Flash, a feature that the iPhone's Safari lacks. We ran our own tests of the N95 browser with Flash turned off in New York and San Francisco, and found some interesting results: The N95 is often slower than was demoed at WWDC. But much, much faster with the free Opera browser with it's images optimised server-side.

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Matthew Miller from ZDNet loaded up Opera Mobile 9.5 on his HTC Advantage, a Windows Mobile device, and thinks it's even better than the iPhone's Safari browser. Why? Because he can select text, copy and paste, save passwords and even email individual images from a page. He says it's the best mobile browser he's ever used (even though Google Docs doesn't work correctly). It's definitely even more like a desktop browser than Apple's offering. You don't need to take his word for it—you can see for yourself in his video. [ZDnet via Into Mobile]

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So, this is the Touch Diamond. It's small, slim, "a holistic experience," according to Horace Luke, HTC's Chief Innovations Officer, and "just like your life." Out in Europe and Asia next month, we should get our hands on it later on this year, and it's the closest thing so far to an iPhone that hasn't come out of Cupertino. Not surprising, since Luke and his team wanted the design to be worthy of MoMA. I'm just not sure about the diamond design on the back. Here is a gallery, the specs and some of the choice quotes from the presentation:

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This video, found on the VMWare Fusion Site, illustrates not only that Sinbad hasn't passed away—as many of us previously thought—but he's a gigantic nerd on the calibre of Gizmodo readers. Just listen to what he says regarding how he runs Windows and OS X simultaneously and marvel at how much more he knows about Macs and virtual machines than even some of your own friends. [VMWare]

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The latest Opera Mobile Browser, version 9.5, has just been previewed in time for GSMA 2008. The new version tries to be more like a desktop browser and adds a full text history search, allowing you to find pages you forgot to bookmark previously. Flash gets a look in too, since Flash Lite 3.0 support is included. More, including the press release, below.

Claiming to be 2.5x faster than Internet Explorer Mobile, Opera 9.5 has an improved rendering engine to better handle JavaScript- and Ajax-laden web pages. It can also serve web content directly to a phone's idle screen, which will either create some cool web-linked functionality, or allow mobile operators to splash more branding onto their phones. Opera Widgets, and Opera Zoom and panning make it sound like the iPhone's UI, don't they?

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There are many reasons that you could call the Opera Mini 4 Beta an assault on the iPhone's Safari browser. New features include: • Overview mode empowers people to browse their favorite websites • Zooms in and cleanly focuses on the content you want (as seen in Opera's Wii browser) • Dynamically changes size of text and images, to read without a lot of scrolling • A virtual mouse to make it easy to scroll in any direction Another reason is the cute but dorky video that totally rips on the iPhone for being expensive and, I guess, in all other ways quite similar to Opera's little wunderbrowser. Hey, are they even using the same New York Times page in their promo image above? – Wilson Rothman Product Page [Opera]