After languishing in Apple’s approval process for an epic 20 days, the Opera Mini web browser has finally been accepted for inclusion in the iPhone App Store.

Opera in App Store 1

Just a wee bit late for me, Apple. I cancelled my O2 iPhone contract yesterday. I’ve had way too many ongoing problems with missed calls, not being able to send picture messages, visual voicemail not working, tethering not working on 2G/Edge, etc.

In fact the problems have been so bad that O2 even waived the £200 termination fee, which I would have had to pay due to there being six months left on my contract. Getting the fee waived took around 90 minutes of arguing with unsympathetic call handlers, but on principle there was no way I was going to pay it, so I persisted and eventually got through to a manager who was very understanding, reasonable, and helpful.

Tomorrow I pick up my HTC Desire, which is reserved for me, and I’ll be getting it on Vodafone. Although I’ve made sure it’s an unlocked phone, just in case I need to jump networks again.

So… after all that waiting, what is Opera Mini like on the iPhone?

First impression is that it’s pretty good. The most obvious improvement over Safari is that scrolling around web pages is much faster, and you don’t get the big grey gaps that you get in Safari while the rendering engine tries to keep up with you.

However there are a couple of obvious problems that I’ve spotted already, although they seem to be ‘features’ rather than bugs. For example, when I load my own web site, look how it wraps the text:

Opera in App Store 2

Similarly when I load Slashdot, it re-formats it like this:

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Still that’s not a deal-breaker because you never read web pages full-size on a mobile, you zoom in. You can double-tap or un-pinch to zoom in Opera just like in Safari. But you can’t then double-tap or pinch to zoom out, you have to press the button at the bottom left of the screen. This is something they need to fix in a future release as double-tap to zoom out is standard on the iPhone.

Opera in App Store 3

One quick mention of a nice time-saving feature. When you type a web site address, as soon as you press ‘dot’ you get a selection list with alternative top-level domains:

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I’ll have a proper play with Opera later today. I’m especially interested to see how it deals with having multiple sites open in separate tabs, as it’s meant to handle that more elegantly than Safari.