Opera Mini for the iPhone, regardless of whether you sit on the side of the fence that likes it or not, is proving to be quite popular. The application only came out a few days ago, yet it was downloaded by 1,023,380 users in 24 hours. In 22 countries, including the USA, USA, France, Germany and Italy, Opera Mini is the most popular application in Apple’s App Store.
To really experience the benefit of Opera Mini you need to either be stuck in a part of the world with terrible 3G reception, such as the East or West coast of the United States, or be traveling abroad and really depend on mobile internet access, regardless of the fact that the roaming charges are going to nail you to the wall. Opera Mini is perfect for both those situations, and even if you don’t use it as your main browser, it’s nice to have as a back up.
We’re not going to know the full success of Opera Mini for the iPhone until the April and June edition of Opera’s “State of the Mobile Web” reports gets published, and that’ll happen in June and July respectively.
“Today iPhone users have a choice, and, as the numbers show, they are eager to explore new and faster ways to surf the Web on the iPhone – especially during heavy Web traffic,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software. “With any widely available and frequently downloaded Opera product, we are appreciative of all the feedback we are getting, as it helps us to continually improve our product and better meet the needs of our users.”
Many people, including myself, have problems with Opera Mini’s rendering of fonts. Due to the compression algorithm that Opera Mini uses, all fonts seem to default to Arial, and that really ruins the richness of a site, richness many of us didn’t even know about until we saw what sites looked like in native mobile browsers. Spacing also isn’t perfect.
The main reason I used to use Opera Mini was because Nokia devices came, actually they still do, come with slow processors. The bandwidth coming into the device was not a problem, the processing of said bandwidth into a usable web page was the problem. Now with a 1 GHz Snapdragon powered Google Nexus One in my pocket, plus a 3 to 3.5 megabit HSPA connection, pages render faster than they do in Opera Mini since they no longer need to go to a server in Norway, process, and then come back to my device.
Maybe version 6 will fix all my problems, here’s hoping!