{"id":4945,"date":"2010-04-15T08:17:22","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T13:17:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/?p=4945"},"modified":"2014-05-22T13:38:05","modified_gmt":"2014-05-22T18:38:05","slug":"iphone-app-review-opera-mini","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eshop.macsales.com\/blog\/4945-iphone-app-review-opera-mini\/","title":{"rendered":"iPhone App Review: Opera Mini"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We delayed our weekly Free App review by a day this week, in order to give ourselves some time to get to know Monday’s new release: Opera Mini Web browser<\/a>.<\/p>\n

App Description:<\/h3>\n

Get a fast, cost-efficient Web browsing experience. Use our powerful servers to compress data by up to 90% before sending it to your iPhone, so page-loads are lightning fast. Opera Mini is a breeze to use, and can synchronize data between your phone and computer.<\/p>\n

Some great features of Opera Mini:<\/strong>
\n-Speed Dial gets you to your favorite Web sites with a single tap.
\n-An address field with auto-completion means you type less.
\n-Tabs allow for multitasking with several Web pages.
\n-Bookmarks can be easily managed and accessed.<\/p>\n

OWC Mike H’s Review<\/h3>\n

\"\"To the surprise of many, Apple approved the Opera Browser App for iPhone and iPod Touch. After using for a mere 5 minutes I can see why they did it. The Opera app is one giant piece of terrible. This is definitely a \u201cdownload, try, and delete\u201d app. Where to start\u2026 it\u2019s doesn\u2019t render much accurately, navigating back and forth actually breaks page layouts, it knocks all the content around, can\u2019t scroll without jittering, doesn\u2019t resize fonts, and\u2026 well it does a lot of things wrong with \u201cfrustrating\u201d being the best word to describe the app.<\/p>\n

The only good thing I can report is that Opera was much faster at loading content (likely due to everything routing through Opera\u2019s servers for recompression, no secure banking here). Like the Millenium Falcon<\/a>, Opera\u2019s a fast \u201chunk of junk\u201d, but unlike the rebel ship, this browser won\u2019t be winning any wars. Perhaps Mozilla will feel emboldened to make FireFox and we\u2019ll have a real viable option to for those that don\u2019t like Safari for whatever reason.<\/p>\n

I cannot imagine many people would prefer this experience over Safari, and I think the Opera people were a little more than disingenuous with the quality of their app when they previewed it in a video a month ago.\u00a0It\u2019s free, but it leaves a bad aftertaste.<\/p>\n

OWC Chris S’s Review<\/h3>\n

Being the offshoot of a more popular desktop browser, Opera mini may have made the biggest splash in the iPhone browser field, but it’s not the first “alternate” browser released. Most of these, however, seem to use the Safari\/Webkit underpinnings available to devs, and just add tabs, “full screen” browsing, and other features. I tried about a half a dozen of them, including Opera, just so I could see how it stacked up to its “competition.”<\/p>\n

In order to compare them, I loaded a “test page” (the OWC Blog main page), tried to set it as my “home” page, and then opened a new tab to go to the OWC site. I figured that’d give a range of basic usability to judge things on.<\/p>\n

To paraphrase Roger Ebert’s review of North<\/a><\/em>, I hated this browser. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this browser.<\/p>\n

In every other browser I tested,<\/em> the normal view of the page was resized properly to fit the screen, keeping layout intact while keeping text legible. Opera, on the other hand, turned the text into illegible little squiggles, and simultaneously broke text wrapping around images. Take a look at the screenshot above. See that picture of the iPad case? The text should be flowing around it.<\/p>\n

It seems like the folks at Opera took a columnar approach to displaying. Tapping a column of text zoomed in, making it readable, and the resultant layout was “okay,” but unless you’re just reading pages with straight hypertext, the experience is extremely disappointing, especially if there are images that go with the text.<\/p>\n

Speed wasn’t as impressive as I was led to believe, either. While this is a “subjective” feel, there were points that it felt slower<\/em> than the others over WiFi, especially when I stopped using their servers and connected directly to sites.<\/p>\n

There was only one feature I liked, and that was the Speed Dial page, which could be useful if there were sites I visited frequently. That isn’t enough to save Opera mini from a quick removal, though.<\/p>\n

Final Verdict:<\/strong> Mobile Safari is probably still your best bet for Web browsing in iPhone OS. If you absolutely must<\/em> have a different browser, save yourself a painful browsing experience and choose anything<\/em> but Opera mini.<\/p>\n

OWC Michael’s Review<\/h3>\n

Although I didn’t get to spend much time with this, I must say it is fast.\u00a0\u00a0Web pages did load faster than Safari on my home wireless system. The\u00a0navigation of pages is intuitive – if not everything I was looking for. Zoom was a bit tricky to bring up just the portion of the webpage I wanted to see.\u00a0Using the un-pinch motion to zoom in seemed to instantly bring full zoom in from the full zoom out position. I also found it a bit annoying to use in\u00a0that to use a link I had to click it twice every time to get to the next page I wanted to see, which reminded me a little of Windows Vista (Are you sure\u00a0you want to do that? Cancel or allow.<\/a>)\u00a0\u00a0Minor issues that I’ll either get used to or figure out the easiest way to get it to do what I want.<\/p>\n

The pages also didn’t quite look the same.\u00a0\u00a0While I couldn’t find any content missing on Opera’s pages, I did have to scroll a bit to find everything.\u00a0\u00a0On many sites, the layout was changed to show each element one on top of the next leaving much more white space towards the right of the\u00a0screen.\u00a0\u00a0Annoying from a design aspect, but still functional – like using a text only browser.<\/p>\n

The start page is great showing 9 sites that you can bookmark similar to the full version of Safari 4’s Top Sites (hint, hint, Apple – please add that to\u00a0mobile Safari).\u00a0\u00a0I use that feature so much in my daily workflow with the full version of Safari that it would be nice to have the few pages I visit on a daily basis previewed.\u00a0\u00a0Admittedly, I haven’t set up the start page yet or really delved into the other features and settings of Opera mini for iPhone yet as I really didn’t get\u00a0much of a chance to use it before writing this review – but so far so good. \u00a0It certainly won’t be replacing my use of Safari, but I think I’ll be keeping this one around.<\/p>\n

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We delayed our weekly Free App review by a day this week, in order to give ourselves some time to get to know Monday’s new release: Opera Mini Web browser. App Description: Get a fast, cost-efficient Web browsing experience. Use our powerful servers to compress data by up to 90% before sending it to your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":4954,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[932],"class_list":["post-4945","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-app-review"],"yoast_head":"\niPhone App Review: Opera Mini<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Apple approved the Opera Browser App for iPhone and iPod Touch. 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