With Weekly Build 8732, the feature has been revealed as "Speed Dial".
Quote -
Opera Mini already adds Speed Dial shortcuts to the first 9 links on the start page, so you can just press *1 to get to your favorite site on your phone. Now we do the same thing for desktop, where Ctrl+1 to Ctrl+9 gives you direct access to your 9 favorites. When you open a new tab, the 9 Speed Dial sites will be displayed with pretty thumbnails, a single mouse click away.
Why Speed Dial?
Bookmarks often fall into two categories:
1) A bunch of sites you bookmark because you may want to visit them again someday
2) 5 or 6 sites you visit very often
Speed Dial is an elegant way to address the second category. When you open a new tab, it will often be to go to one of your favorite sites, so why not just show them there instead of an entirely blank page? Adding your favorites to Speed Dial is also very, very simple: Just click the button and choose a site from your Top 10 history or from the currently open tabs. Deleting them is just as simple, with the X in the upper right corner.
Changelog:
• Fixed several crashes when printing, sending mail, removing active web panel...
• Lots of minor fixes.
• Start bar is replaced by Speed Dial, Top-10 and Bookmark buttons can be found in the Appearance dialog and added to other toolbars.
• Canvas: Stopped drawing lines from origin (0, 0) when using path functions in accordance with changes in WHATWG canvas spec. Note to Widget developers: This may cause problems with your Widgets if you use Canvas.
Known issues:
• Overrides your search.ini file instead of merging them: Make a backup before installing.
• Thumbnails should not reload on every startup.
• "Reload every..." is missing from the context menu.
• Middle-click doesn't open pages in the background.
• Back button doesn't go back to Speed Dial.
• Several skin and display problems.
• Contains some hardcoded not translatable strings.
• The "What is Speed Dial" link doesn't go anywhere.
Download : http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/o920w_8732m.exe
* This is just an internal weekly build for beta testing
