Apple approves Opera Mini for iPhone — available now for free

Apple has approved the Opera Mini web browser for the iPhone — a decision that not many people were expecting, given its past treatment of apps that duplicate the functionality of built-in apps.

To recap, Opera Mini is a web browser with a difference in that it doesn’t do any page rendering on the device itself. Instead, page requests go via Opera’s proxy server, which pulls down the page, formats it accordingly and compresses it, before sending it back. This results in a dramatic speed increase for displaying pages, making it a strong performer over EDGE and GPRS connections (Opera Mini started life as a Java-based browser for mobile phones).

We’ve spent the morning using Opera Mini on the iPhone and we’re pretty impressed, but it isn’t without its problems. We like the ‘speed dial’ homepage that lets you quickly select a site from a grid of thumbnails and can’t wait for Apple to add a similar (and much-needed) ‘search in page’ to Safari. We’d prefer a pinch rather than a tap to zoom (though this is apparently an Apple restriction), but the speed at which pages open is extremely impressive.

The first problem is that Opera Mini can’t access Safari’s bookmarks and while this may be another restriction put in place by Apple, it’s still very annoying. Opera does offer its own bookmark sync service with the desktop version of Opera, but that isn’t much use if you use Firefox, Safari, Chrome or Internet Explorer on your computer.

More frustrating, however, is that Opera Mini isn’t very good at fitting zoomed pages on-screen. A double-tap in Safari almost always results in a column of text and images that have been perfectly rejigged to suit the iPhone’s screen width. The same can’t be said of Opera Mini — just take a look at these screen shots to see what we mean.

Opera Mini also seems oblivious to Flash content — not an issue as such, since the iPhone doesn’t support it, but the iPhone at least displays a Flash placeholder to show you that something’s missing. This is more of a problem with embedded YouTube video and while Safari will link to the appropriate H.264 clip where possible, Opera Mini pretends that there’s nothing there at all — as these screenshots show.

These latter limitations are understandable given the way in which Opera Mini works, but they relegate the browser to secondary status on the iPhone and you’ll always need Safari for web browsing proper. Even so, it’s a handy app to have for those times when you can’t connect via 3G and since it doesn’t cost a penny, it’s certainly worth downloading.

[ Opera Mini for iPhone]