Opera Mini for iPhone Review
Friday, April 16th, 2010Opera Mini is Opera’s cut-down Web browser for smartphones. Opera recently built a version of Opera Mini for the iPhone/iPod Touch and submitted it to the App Store, practically daring Apple to reject it. (Apple are known for rejecting apps that compete with their own built-in iPhone apps.)
Well, despite speculation to the contrary, Apple recently approved Opera Mini on the App Store, so you can now download it for free and use it as well as (or instead of) Safari on your iPhone. So how does it stack up? Here’s my in-depth review of Opera Mini on the iPhone.
Starting Opera Mini
When you first start Opera, you get a start screen much like Opera Desktop’s “Speed Dial” screen. This allows you to have up to 9 sites instantly accessible by tapping icons. It’s very handy for frequently-used sites:
The search box
Opera has a search field top-right, just like Safari. However, rather than just searching Google, Opera also lets you search Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia, and you can add your own search engines too. Nice touch.