Hasta La Gadget!

Apr 13

Approved! Plucky Underdog Opera Now on iPhone

Posted in: iPhone, Opera, Phones, Software, Today's Chili

Exactly three weeks after a very public submission to the App Store, Opera’s Mini web browser has been approved by Apple and is available for download. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, go download Opera Mini now (iTunes app link). It is free. I’ll wait.

Back? You will notice how fast this Gadget Lab page loads up. That’s because Opera Mini isn’t loading the page. Instead, it is pulling down an optimized, compressed version from Opera’s servers, one which looks and feels just like the real thing, with clickable links and selectable text and zoomable images (but without video or Flash), but is encoded in a special markup language and compressed to as little as 10 percent of the original data footprint.

Apple’s decision to admit Opera Mini to the App Store caught many people by surprise, because it’s a browser. Apple has tended to reject apps that replicate (or improve upon) the features of built-in apps, and Opera Mini is clearly a replacement for the version of Safari that comes with the iPhone. However, Apple softened its stance in early 2009 and started allowing browser apps, as long as they were based on WebKit, the HTML rendering engine used by the iPhone. Opera Mini’s not the only third-party browser in the App Store: You can also download iCab Mobile, a $2 browser that’s been available since April 2009, as well as a handful of specialized iPhone browsers.

Other features of Opera Mini you may appreciate during your test drive: You might notice the “speed dial” page, like the tab-showcase page of Google’s Chrome or Safari for the Mac and PC. This is very handy for visiting oft-used pages quickly. You are also no doubt enjoying the fast back-and-forward navigation. Unlike Mobile Safari, Opera Mini caches pages and tabs in-session and even when you quit and relaunch the app. This means you don’t have to wait for pages to reload.

It’s not all great, though. If you’re trying out Opera while you read this, you will likely be getting frustrated right about now because of the screwy zoom controls: You can double-tap to zero in on a column of text, just like Safari, but pinch to zoom is all over the place. It feels like Android. And while text is re-flowed, pictures are not re-sized to match. No, go ahead and copy this sentence to the clipboard. Weird, right?

Still, you want to have this on your iPhone, especially if you are on EDGE, are roaming or just want to save on bandwidth while speeding up your browsing. You can’t make it your iPhone’s default browser, so clicking on links in e-mail messages, for instance, will still open pages in Safari.

Opera Mini won’t work with every site — and it doesn’t support Adobe Flash — but for quick bursts of browsing, the kind often done on cellphones, it is ideal.

Opera Mini [iTunes]

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