Opera Mini Aims For Deployment On Apple's iPhone: Competition For Safari?

At first glance, we suspected this was some sort of joke. But no, this is real. Very real. Opera, which is a smaller, up-and-coming browser company, has just announced their full intention to introduce Opera Mini for...the iPhone. Yeah, the iPhone. The phone that Apple has total and absolute control over, and it plans on submitting it to the App Store which Apple also controls with an iron fist.

To date, Apple has been pretty clear about app rejections. If you submit something that simulates something that Apple already enables the iPhone to do itself, then it will be rejected. As in, if you submit an "iPod" app, it will be rejected, since Apple already has an iPod app on there. This is the same reason that there's no "Chrome" app on the iPhone, because Mobile Safari is already on there and provided by Apple. If history repeats itself, one would think that Apple would reject Opera Mini without even thinking twice about.

But regardless of all that, Opera still feels that it has a fighting chance of being just the second web browser to ever be officially granted approval for use on the iPhone operating system. The company is even going to Mobile World Congress next week in order to provide a "sneak peek," and they are promising a "new way to surf the web on the iPhone - an experience that Opera promises will be fast, easy to use, and packed with favorite Opera features."

Opera Mini is known for performing well on other mobile platforms, and it's far superior to Internet Explorer for mobiles. We still have to wait and see if Apple will allow this kind of tampering with their protocol, but we're excited to think that some real competition could soon be coming to the phone.

Opera Mini is renowned for its compression technology, which results in significantly faster Web-page loading and reduces data surcharges. With favorite desktop features in its arsenal, such as tabs, Speed Dial and the password manager, Opera Mini is designed with usability in mind.

“We are thrilled to offer journalists and partners an exclusive preview of Opera Mini for iPhone during the year’s biggest mobile event,” said Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder, Opera Software. “This is a unique opportunity to introduce the fast, feature-rich Opera Mini experience for the iPhone, and to showcase our latest beta releases of Opera Mobile and Opera Mini on other platforms and devices. Opera’s mission is to bring the Web to the world, and by making Opera Mini available on yet another platform, we are one step closer.”