Opera 9.7 available in beta

Good news. Opera 9.7 Beta now available for Windows Mobile devices. It promises to render pages faster and with better compression. The new version also includes Opera Widgets manager.

9.7 beta known issues
Browser
+ Opera Turbo in Opera Mobile is still a preview-feature;
o Downloads don't work while Opera Turbo is enabled.
o Some settings (such as toggle on/off images) do not apply when Opera Turbo is enabled.
+ On older WM 5.0 Devices with 480x800 resolution, switching between portrait and landscape may cause display errors. This is due to lack of support for this resolution in early versions of Microsoft's driver.
+ Some input method editors are known not to work well with Opera because they do not comply with Microsoft's SIP and/or IME standard. When such an editor is detected by Opera, Opera will use a known (default) input method instead. An exception is EzInput v1.5, where the phone keypad and compact QUERTY, ABC mode doesn't work, but the rest of the modes work fine. We recommend upgrading to EzInput v2.0 to avoid this.
+ Only support for FlashLite 3.x. No Flash plugin included.

Widget manager add-on
+ The Widget manager is an add-on to the browser, so the browser must be installed in order for the widget manager to work.
+ We recommend disabling Opera Turbo in the browser when using the widget manager.
+ Rotating widgets does not work properly. Portrait mode should be used when running widgets.
+ Widgets + Plugins (Flash & Gears) don't work.
+ Clicking internal links in a widget will launch the browser.
+ Twitter widget might have login problems on first run. If this happens, just close the Twitter widget (X) and open it again.

You can check out all of the details and download for yourself over at Opera.