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iPhone

Opera Mini iPhone app

The iPhone finally has another web browser thanks to the chaps from Opera (iTunes Link – Free) . You may have used Opera Mini before on other mobile operating systems, such as Symbian, and I have to admit that I much prefered using it over the standard browser.

Opera made a bit of a whoha when they submitted the app to the app store about 3 weeks ago. They had a counter which showed how long it took Apple to approve the app, which they finally did this morning.

I downloaded the free app this morning and gave it a whirl, and was pleasantly surprised. It did take a while to load the first time I used it, but since then it seems to be working brilliantly. I am going to try to use it exclusively over the next couple of days and see how it pans out.

Here is the official press release from the guys at Opera:

Opera today announced its popular mobile browser, Opera Mini has been approved for iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store. Opera Mini will be available as a free download within 24 hours, depending on market.

Opera Mini, with more than 50 million users worldwide, enables fast mobile Web browsing by compressing data by up to 90 percent before sending content to the device, resulting in significantly improved page loading. Users of the app will notice an uptake in speed, especially on slower networks such as the 2G Edge network. Surfing the Web with the Opera Mini App on iPhone and iPod touch will also help users save money because of its data compression capabilities. This will hold especially true while the user is incurring roaming charges.

“We are delighted to offer iPhone and iPod touch users a great browsing experience with the Opera Mini App,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software. “This app is another step toward Opera’s goal of bringing the Web to more people in more places.”

The Opera Mini App is available for free from the App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore/.

If you have downloaded the new Opera Mini for iPhone, leave a comment below and let me know what you think ?

9 replies on “Opera Mini iPhone app”

Looking forward to hearing about your test drive. Great to have peeps like you to do the hard work for the rest of us! Looking forward to reading your review.

Very fast…i’m digging it. Only issue is that double-tap to zoom doesn’t work so lekker. pinch to zoom is exclusive to Safari apparently.

@Adiel on you with the zooming thing. Bizarre I suppose it’s a learning curve. I love the UI really nice. It is quite snappy when loaded, but the launch time on my 3G is over 15 seconds. Well it is the first release, I am sure things will go better from here. I was quite suspicious that Apple won’t let this one out, and I am sure they have looked more at legal issues not allowing it (IE-XP saga) that at the actual app.

I am suprisingly dissapointed by this release, and I think the second week will prove interesting in terms of it’s ratings. It’s getting a lot of the “fanboy” type 5 star ratings with no real substance to back that up.

The good: it is fast. and it seems faster than Safari does. It looks really nice, and I really like the Start Page and general options management.

The bad: the bottom menu is too oversized and wastes critical space. The alternative is Full screen which is pretty good.
It’s rotation and resize is not great, unless you’re on a proper mobile site, and even then it’s a mess. see cnnmobile.com as a simple example.
It doesn’t render styles very well at all, and the font size adjustments are fairly useless due to the point above.

The downright ugly: It cannot zoom to save it’s life :-( it’s either fullsize, or tiny. How is it that every single app that supports zoom can get it right, except an app that has the primary task of displaying text?
And then there’s the tabs. You hold on a link while it “thinks” about what to do, and when you chose new tab, it does fine, until you want to manage them, then it’s a dog. It doesn’t respond well to the first click of whatever you want to do with the tab(s).

So in summary, it is nothing even close to the built-in safari, except for the speed of loading, which is irrelevant if you cannot really read your page very well.

I’ll hang onto it for a while to see if they fix these items, but so far, it doesn’t touch me on my studio…

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