First Impressions: Opera Mini on the iPhone

By  |  Monday, March 15, 2010 at 6:26 am

Here at South by Southwest Interactive, I finally got a little hands-on time with Opera Mini for the iPhone, which Opera started showing off last month at the Mobile World Congress Show in Barcelona.  The Norwegian browser company told me that it’s still putting the finishing touches on it and plans to submit it to the iPhone App Store real soon now.

On every platform it runs on, Opera Mini’s signature feature is that it’s speedy, thanks to server-side compression that crunches Web pages down before they get sent to the browser. In my extremely informal experiments here at SXSW, Mini didn’t feel particularly zippy. (Actually, it loaded the New York Times’ home page more slowly than Mobile Safari did.) But it may not have been a real-world test of how it’ll perform when Apple approves it (please!) and it shows up on the App Store: An Opera representative told me that the compression is still going on via servers in far-away Norway, which would tend to bog things down.

Whatever its performance turns out to be like, Opera Mini has some features that might lead some folks to opt for it over Safari, at least on a part-time basis. It’s got Opera’s Speed Dial feature, which lets you get to favorite Web sites with one tap. It uses Opera Link to synchronize bookmarks with other copies of Opera on different devices.  It lets you search for text within the current page, a pretty basic feature which Safari lacks.

On the other hand, Mini doesn’t try to match the desktop-like accuracy with which Safari renders Web pages: It just displays a rough approximation (albeit an acceptable one, at least on the pages I visited). And I don’t think it offers Safari’s ability to play YouTube videos.

Once Opera submits Mini for approval, Apple’s response will be one of the bigger litmus tests in iPhone history to date. Apple has been known to reject apps on the grounds that they duplicate existing iPhone functionality or might confuse users. But iPhone owners deserve to be treated like grownups who are smart enough to try multiple browsers before settling on one if they so choose. Just as they get to do on Android and just about every other platform, mobile or otherwise.

By submitting Opera Mini, Opera will be doing iPhone owners a favor. Heck, it’ll even do Apple a favor, by giving it a golden opportunity to do the right thing.

 
8 Comments


Read more: , , ,

2 Comments For This Post

  1. Marius Says:

    Why does no-one mention the incredible bandwidth-saving of Opera Mini in terms of money instead of downloadtime? Is it because everyone in America has “unlimited” subscriptions? Here in Europe that is not the norm and so the savings because of saved bandwidth using Opera Mini is a very relevant factor.

  2. Max Says:

    I always use Opera Mini when surfing on the Internet with my iPhone by Apple. I already tried Internet Explorer and Firefox but no browser was better than Opera so I decided to use this application as my standard browser for the iPhone. There is an easy difference – Opera Mini is easy to handle and uses Flash.

6 Trackbacks For This Post

  1. McCracken’s impressions of Opera Mini for iPhone | The Loop Says:

    […] First Impressions: Opera Mini on the iPhone [Technologizer] […]

  2. بلاك لينك » إطلاق النسخ الأخيرة للمتصفح opera mini 5 و opera mobile 10 Says:

    […] https://www.technologizer.com/2010/03/15/…on-the-iphone/ […]

  3. Win a Ford Fiesta: Designed by American Idol Finalists | Gadget Public Informations Says:

    […] First Impressions: Opera Mini on the iPhone […]

  4. Opera Submits Opera Mini to the App Store. Your Move, Apple Says:

    […] technology makes Opera Mini up to six times faster than Apple’s Mobile Safari. When I tried Mini on the iPhone last week at the South by Southwest conference, I didn’t see that speed boost–but an […]

  5. iPad Questions and Answers Says:

    […] Answer: No, unfortunately–Safari for iPad feels like a plus-size twin of the iPhone one, with the same virtues and limitations. Find-in-page is certainly on my wish list for the next version of Mobile Safari (or maybe we’ll get it via an iPad edition of Opera Mini). […]

  6. Opera Mini for iPhone approved, will be available for free « Dayhacker Says:

    […] First Impressions: Opera Mini on the iPhone (technologizer.com) Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)Justin.tv free app comes to iPhoneThe Apple-Adobe War Escalates: Using Flash to Build iPhone Apps BannedPayPal Transfers Made Simple: Just Bump iPhonesOpera Mini for iPhone 5 submitted to the App Store [video] 51.513330 -0.088947 Categories: IPhone Tags: Add new tag, App Store, Apple, IPhone, iPhone 3G, Opera, Operating system, Safari, Web browser Comments (0) Trackbacks (0) Leave a comment Trackback […]