Last week, Opera Mini for iPhone was finally approved by the App Store. It was a long-awaited app, and many had been concerned it wouldn’t be approved by Apple.

The response to the new browser was so overwhelming that it was downloaded over one million times on its first day of release. Clearly there was significant pent-up need and a general dissatisfaction with Safari, the native iPhone browser.

I was one of those one million folks who downloaded, and I wanted to write up a quick review of the app after using it for a little less than a week.

In a word. Wow!

It is an improvement in almost every way over Safari. Its biggest selling point is speed. I was never particularly unhappy with Safari’s speed. I would even sometimes wait patiently for a web page to download over Edge. I took it as the price of mobile browsing.

I’m delighted to say that patience is not a price we have to pay any longer. Last Wednesday, when the app was released, I had a meeting with a client who also has a iPhone. At the end of our session, we did a speed test.

Full disclosure. The test was not completely fair. One of us was running an iPhone 3GS and the other was running a 3G. The 3GS is a slightly faster phone, even over Edge, which was the network setting we used. Figured the best test was to use the slowest of all the options. It also minimized the 3GS’ slight advantage.

We both opened our browsers and did a Google search on my website. Once we both had it in our search screens, we started the clock and tapped the links.

The results? 12 seconds to completely load the page in Opera Mini. 35 seconds in Safari!

Remember the 3G vs. 3GS difference? The phone running Safari was the 3GS, the slightly faster machine.

So yeah, Opera Mini is fast.

But is speed really everything? What about other features? Opera Mini wins hands down on those as well.

When you load the program, you get a very nice splash screen grid with slots for quick bookmarks. Some are pre-loaded (weather, etc), but you can customize. Saves tapping for the bookmark menu for the sites you use the most.

Opera Mini prompts to remember user names and passwords. Safari does not. Even when there is a box “Remember me,” and I click it, Safari never remembers. Obviously, I don’t use this for really sensitive stuff like financial information. But if someone steals my phone and can hack my Google Reader account, I’m not going to lose too much sleep.

The only drawback I’ve seen so far is that I don’t like the way Google Reader looks in Opera. I like the look a screen layout better in Safari. Not sure why it’s different, but it is.

And of course there’s no way to set Opera Mini as the default browser, so you’re stuck with Safari if you click on email links or links from your Twitter or Facebook client.

But I can live with those. Opera Mini is now on my first screen. Safari has to live with being on the second one, and it may eventually move farther back.

Tags: iPhone

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 10:29 am and is filed under iPhone. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.