Is Opera coming to the iPhone?
The folks that brought us the Opera browser for the PC are now saying that they will demonstrate their truly different smartphone browser on the iPhone next week, and that they would like Apple to approve it as an app.
Opera says that this demonstration will happen at next week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. In an interview with Reuters, Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner said, “We have not submitted it yet to the Apple App Store. However, we hope that Apple will not deny their users a choice in Web browsing experience.” Apple has not yet approved a browser other than Safari for use on its mobile platforms, so the acceptance of Opera would be a significant coup for the Norwegian company.
The Opera Mini browser is an excellent choice for the smartphone user. Before the webkit concept became the standard on the iPhone and Android phones, Opera was the only way to get a reasonable browser experience on a smartphone. Opera makes two mobile Web browsers, one a fairly standard browser. The other, Opera Mini, makes browsing on a phone much faster via a bit of sleight of hand, according to a Wired article. Instead of serving the HTML for a page, Opera Mini uses company servers to build a special image of each page and send the image to the phone instead, significantly speeding up the process by sending fewer bytes across the Internet and requiring no HTML rendering on the phone itself.
The problem with Opera Mini vis a vis the iPhone is that it requires Java, and the iPhone does not speak Java. This would intimate that Opera has written an iPhone native app that replaces the Java with the standard iPhone SDK. Neither the press release nor the interview with von Tetzchner actually say that an iPhone app will replace the Opera Mini Java version on the iPhone, but it does make the most sense in this situation. There is also some chance that since such an app would simply present images on the phone it would not run afoul of Apple’s desire to use Safari as the only real browser on the iPhone. It seems like a long shot, but Apple may somehow be induced to approve such an app should it be submitted.
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