A bit more than a month after the release of Opera Mobile 10 for Windows Mobile and Symbian smartphones, we are happy to announce a special developer version of Opera Mobile 10 for Windows, Mac and Linux .

Testing mobile browsers usually requires Web developers to buy one or more devices on which they then can investigate how their Web sites perform. The Opera Mobile emulator is designed to make the whole testing effort a bit easier: you install a small, native application on the platform of your choice, and load Web pages from the comfort of your desktop.

And as with other products powered by Opera Presto 2.4, it is possible to hook up with any Opera Dragonfly instance on the same machine or network and tweak your Web site's code for optimal mobile viewing.

The install package also includes a desktop version of the Opera Widgets manager we've recently released on Opera Labs , named Opera Widgets Mobile Emulator. Using this emulator, you can load and test widgets in a similar manner as you would do on a Symbian or Windows Mobile device.

For this release, we have prepared a developer introduction on Dev.Opera ; the article covers various command line hooks, controls, browser settings and remote debugging scenarios.

Give it a spin, and let us know what you think!

Update: you can download the latest version of the Opera Mobile Emulator from our developer tools section.