During February's 3GSM World Congress, Opera Software premiered version 9.5 of its excellent Opera Mobile web browser for Windows Mobile. Later, in June, Opera said that a public beta of that application would appear on July 15, which came and went yesterday. According to a post on the company's blog, Opera should roll out the beta tomorrow, however.

Update: The public beta is now available. At this point, it only works with Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices with touch screens. More betas will follow in the future, including one for Symbian-run handsets.

The short delay was due to some bugs in the software that recently popped up:

We encountered a few bugs last week that we needed to fix before we launch. Our engineering team worked through the weekend to fix the bugs. Even though our release is a beta, we'd rather spend the extra time to fix them, thus giving you a better experience. The fixes are almost complete now, but we need two more days to run the build through our quality assurance testing. The new launch date is now set for the 17th.

The Opera Mobile 9.5 update is supposed to offer a number of improvements to make the mobile browsing experience closer to that of the desktop than ever before, Opera says. There's now iPhone-like zooming and panning in addition to productivity tools like the ability to save pages for offline browsing, Web address auto complete, and a password manager, for example.

It rendering engine, called Presto, has been modified to accelerate the handling of Web pages that rely heavily on languages like JavaScript and Ajax. This should also make Opera Mobile more responsive when loading sites.

Opera Widgets, mini applications that allow content to be accessed easily from the device idle screen, are included in the new edition as well. There's also Flash Lite 3 support for accessing content on sites like YouTube that rely heavily on Flash-based video and animations

In addition to Windows Mobile, Opera plans to make Opera Mobile 9.5 available for a wide range of other platforms, including Symbian and Linux - as a standalone browser and in a software developer kit.