Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Opera Mini 5.1 for Android release, Opera Software today put up Opera Mobile 10.1 for Symbian 3rd and 5th Edition and Maemo 4.1 and 5.0 (N800, N810 and N900).

This release adds long anticipated support for Geolocation to along with:

• Support for CSS3 border-radius, background attachment, box-shadow, border-image attributes and for the 2D Transforms module.
• The latest Carakan JavaScript engine (with JIT on Maemo)
• The Vega vector graphics library
• An update of the Opera Core and numerous bug fixes

There are also some known issues with this release most notably higher memory usage especially on JavaScript heavy sites. That will not be good news for users of the memory starved Symbian 5th Edition devices which struggle to run Opera Mobile 10.

I installed 10.1 on my Nokia N95-3  and gave it a quick run through. It seems generally as  fast and stable as 10.0 although I could not get Opera Link to work.  I’ve noticed intermittent issues with Opera Link in Opera Mobile before and it always eventually starts working. I hope this is the case with 10.1.

Geolocation definitely works in Opera Mobile 10.1.  Unfortunately not all sites recognize the browser as location aware. In particular Google.com and most other Google services do not. I was able to get Buzz and Google Maps to locate me by using the undocumented URLs;  m.google.com/app/buzz?force=1 and http://maps.google.com/maps/m, respectively. Other sites were Geolocation worked for me were:

Gowalla m.gowalla.com
NextBus nextbus.com/webkit
BigMap linkstore.ru/mbigmap
Geo SMS servletsuite.com/geosms/

I suspect that  the problem with Google is that they are using browser sniffing to detect browser that are known to support geolocation. They just need to add a test for Opera Mobile 10.1’s  user agent which is (on Symbian):

Opera/9.80 (S60; SymbOS; Opera Mobi/751; U; en-US) Presto/2.5.28 Version/10.1

For more about Opera Mobile 10.1 including complete changelogs see:
Opera Mobile 10.1 for S60 and Maemo: Geolocation, Vega and Carakan (with JIT for Maemo) – Haavard’s Blog
Testers wanted: Opera Mobile 10.1 beta for Symbian/S60 – Opera Mobile Blog
Opera Mobile 10.1 Beta is here! – Opera for Symbian OS Forum

Download Opera Mobile 10.1 for Symbian at opera.com/mobile/download/versions (PC) or  m.opera.com/next/ (mobile).

Maemo users can find the new release in the extras-testing repository for the N900 or in extras-devel for the N800 and N810.