Opera’s new mobile browser for the iPhone has finally been approved by Apple to be included on the App Store. Read the official announcement.
I’ve played around with the browser for the past 30 minutes. My impressions are as follows:
Pros
- It’s a wicked fast mobile browser. No doubts about that. A definite improvement over the other browser options on the iPhone.
- The Dashboard is a very welcome addition.
- Zooming in and out of the web page to read different portions of the web page was something I didn’t like at first. After browser a few pages, it grew on me. You can turn on “mobile view” in the settings to force the content to narrow to the view screen.
- Opera’s version of tabbed browsing is remarkable!
- Opera has great offline support through “Saved Pages”.
Cons
- Bookmarks were a little difficult to find at first. It’s located under “Settings” which seems to be the wrong place in my opinion. Trivial, I know.
- You can NOT set the Opera mini as the “default” browser. Though this is directed more towards a failing of the iPhone OS than the Opera browser itself.
- Text heavy pages tend to have some text overlapping issues.
- Unlike its PC brother, the Opera Mini does not pass the ACID 2 or ACID 3 tests.
- On this note, Safari on the iPhone does pass both the ACID 2 and ACID 3 tests.
My overall impression of the new Opera Mini for the iPhone is good. For me, ease of use is a major clincher for mobile internet browsing and the Opera Mini hits the target.
