I'm considering buying Opera Mobile for my smartphone, but I can't seem to find any information regarding the license. Is it a one version deal or is it a lifetime license that allows me to upgrade to the next major version for free? For instance, 8.65 is out now, but 9.x is coming down the pipe. Would I be able to upgrade to 9 for free?

When they changed from Opera 6 to Opera 8 you could upgrade for free. You just had use the previous version's registration code.
See here.
(It's funny that it still says that Opera 8 is free for N70, when they shifted (almost) everything to 30 days trial.)

Well, I'm going to use up the trial first, but I sure hope that's the case if I decide to stick with it. I like Opera Mini, but I'd prefer a native application for my smart phone so I can go to the home screen and jump right back to the browser via the recently launched list.

What do you think of the browser?

Does it bring anything new to the table?

So far, I've been using MS Deepfish and it is amazing, but I didn't know that Opera had it's own mobile bowser.