Opera Mini for iPhone & iPod Touch – My Review

I’ve had a chance to use the recently released Opera Mini browser for iPhone and iPod Touch for the last couple of weeks and thought that it was enough time to give a proper review of the application. I provided my first impressions in an earlier blog post but will elaborate on my findings.

Opera Mini (Speed Dial Screen)

When you open the application, you are presented with a “speed dial” screen where you can quickly navigate to your most favourite websites (which you can set yourself). Access to additional tabs is done through the second last icon on the bottom of the screen whilst the application preferences is accessed through the spanner icon on the end.

Opera Mini (Tab Switching)

Navigating tabs is fairly simple, just tap on the tab you want to preview before committing to your decision by tapping back on the main part of the screen. Closing a tab involves bringing it to the forefront and then tapping the close icon in the top right hand corner of the miniature preview of the tab.

Opera Mini (SMH)

In terms of viewing webpages, Opera Mini does a good job rendering pages which are built specifically for the browser. Scrolling has a slightly different feel of friction compared to Safari as it feels slightly less fluid. Not a big deal but it may take some slight adjustment for those very much used to Safari. Page rendering also has a perceived snappiness about it which may have to do with pages going through Opera’s proxy servers.

On the downside, the magnification for viewing websites only has two settings, maximum and minimum zoom. There is no ability to get any sort of intermediate zoom forcing you to either view the site with unreadable text because it is too small or zoom right in and scroll around the page. Due to the level of zoom, it can take some effort to get from one side of the page to the other but almost seems more convenient than zooming in and out all the time.

Also, all traffic goes through Opera’s proxy servers including secure traffic. So, if you were planning on doing Internet banking or interacting with any sort of sensitive information, you might want to reach for Safari instead.

Opera Mini also has a setting to go for either the mobile or native version of websites. As websites begin to tailor their websites for optimal viewing in Opera Mini, you might find that either version of a given website may not render so well.

On the whole, it’s not bad but I think I will be going back to Safari on the iPhone.