Against All Odds, Opera for iPhone Hits the App Store

April 13, 2010 - By Jose A. Gutierrez

News about Apple’s approval of the long-awaited Opera Mini browser for the iPhone started spreading through the Twitterverse early Monday evening. Tech sites all over the internet reported that in a surprising twist of events, Apple had given the green light to Opera to have its own small share of the App Store. Considered direct competition for the iPhone’s native browser, many assumed Apple would find a way to disapprove the submission, based on some sort of technicality.

We have seen Apple turn down applications, with less similarity, before, for allegedly “duplicating functionality” of built-in iPhone apps. You may recall the Geek Shui Living story from February 11, 2010, covering the initial submission of the app to Apple for consideration. In it, we echoed the skepticism of many others, regarding the approval. For that mater, the skepticism of this app getting approved was so high that Opera even had a web site counting the days it would take Apple to respond to their submission. At 12:01 EST on April 13, 2010 the app appeared on the App Store as a free download of 1003 KB in size.

The browser’s features and specs will be familiar to anyone who has used Opera on another platform. Once installed, the App opens up to an Icon based homepage similar to Google Chrome called Speed Dial with a set of visual bookmarks that can be customized to your needs, there is also an address bar and a Google branded search bar. On the bottom there are back, forward, reload, tabs and tools buttons. Of these the most interesting is the tabs button that raises a menu from the lower part of the browser to show pictures or a visual representation of the pages you have open and slows for quick switching between different tabs or pages.

Speaking of quick switching, moving around the app is very fluid and gives a snappy sensation of speed. Since the technology behind the browser’s design is based on a proxy server that creates a cache of pages before it displays the content on the device, when you visit a previously unvisited site may seem to take some time, but after the site has been cached the pages load instantly on subsequent visits.

When you first visit a page and touch an area where there is a paragraph the browser quickly zooms and fills the screen with the text to be read without having to use any dual finger gestures. Browsing around we also noticed that neither HTML5 video or Flash is supported, leaving a bit of a gap in terms of media intensive sites like youtube.com. Overall, the browser does very well on text-oriented sites.

Ultimately, does Opera duplicate Safari’s functionality? Will you completely switch from Safari to Opera? The answer is most likely no on both accounts. Rememer, if you were to hit a link from any other iPhone App on the iPhone, the link will open in Safari. In the end, there’s no way around that integration. This is a fact that probably didn’t escape Apple’s attention.

Opera for iPhone can be downloaded now, via the App Store.