Not 24 hours ago I was eagerly awaiting the release of Opera for iPhone, so I was very happy to see Opera publish this press release. About 20 minutes later, the time it took to actually get into the store, it was on my phone. I was personally one of the first people to write a review on iTunes where I gave it 3 of 5 stars, just so it wouldn’t be completely looked over. The browser itself is only a big deal because it is the first non-Webkit browser in the application store. I don’t actually know how much of a feat this is, as in I haven’t heard about any other browsers actually getting denied, but Opera did a great job building up the hype for the release. Not to long ago they released a video showing Opera running on an iPhone 3Gs right beside MobileSafari. Opera absolutely creamed it on EDGE which got a lot of people stirring. Because of Apple’s super closed environment not many people, myself included, expected them to actually accept the application because it obviously “directly duplicates functionality on the device,” which is one of the reasons Apple has to deny your application.
Yet since there was so much hype about Opera coming to the iPhone and it would’ve been very strange for Apple to deny an application that has many very similar counterparts already in the store, they actually accepted it. Whether they did that because of their good will, Opera’s countup timer to see if they would actually approve it, or the fact that it’s UI is so terrible they just felt sorry for them. That’s right I said it, the user interface of Opera is about 10 times worse than that of Opera on my Mac, and that’s saying something. Don’t get me wrong yet, there are a few cool features to Opera Mini that I definitely like, they just don’t out weigh how disgusting it is. Let’s go with the happy stuff first.
Loved
It’s Fast
This fact is indisputable: it is fast. Why? How does it work? It’s quite simple actually, mainly if you say you want to go to GoGoGadgets (shameless plug) their servers grab our site, strip it down cache it and send you a tiny version. Why is that bad? Well it looks funky thats for sure. The way it caches sites makes the text tiny and unreadable, like this.
I don’t know about you but that irks me to no end. First off it totally kills the look of the site, and secondly you can’t read ANYTHING with out zooming in?!? You can even read the title of the article without zooming in on it, which means if you were looking for something of a specific topic you would zoom in, oops thats not it, zoom out, scroll, zoom in, there it is! Which wastes a ridiculous amount of time!
Zooming
This is the first time that I’ve seen this very cool zooming feature. Mainly when you tap to zoom in the back button morphs into a zoom out button so rather than having to tap again to zoom out the back button will do it for you.
Although I think it’s still easier to just tap again to zoom out props for being original Opera, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of this stuff in the future.
Top Sites
One of two flash features of Opera mini is the Safari Top Sites like view.
This is quite nice for getting to places you go often quickly without having to dive into book marks menus.
Tabs
By far my favorite features and the other flashy features of Opera mini is the Tabs. Tabs are something people have wanted in MobileSafari forever, although I don’t get why windows are so bad. But the Opera team really did it with their implementation of tabs.
They made a quick way to open and view multiple tabs that still looks as nice as it can in their terrible interface. Now that I’ve used up all the good features on with the bad.
Hated
The UI
You’ve probably caught me about 3 times completely bashing the UI of Opera, but I’m not doing it because I completely despise them, just hear me out. I think this image from Loren Britcher, the founder of Tweetie, says a lot.
And as he so eloquently put it, “This is pretty self-explanatory: Stop fucking it up.” For Opera this is just the beginning, the just should’ve given up on their red trademark color and made it look nice, not like it was ported from a Blackberry. Oh no, it doesn’t end there, besides the fact that they wouldn’t use the nice Apple interface elements that make applications look oh so pretty, a lot of stuff they did just doesn’t make sense. Like their menu navigation.
Normally you dive into a menu and to go back you press the button on the left with the triangle shaped side. Oh look at that, it’s on the RIGHT SIDE, all I have to say about that is what the heck were they thinking. That just doesn’t make sense, it’s like not a single one of their designers, if they even have any, have ever touched an iPhone or even a mac for that matter.
“Fullscreen mode”
I could’ve packed this under UI and it would’ve made sense but I figured I’d give it a section because of the demand for a fullscreen browser on the iPhone. I spent a while using VanillaSurf, a browser with a stellar fullscreen mode, and it was very hard to move back to MobileSafari just because I lost that feature. Opera’s “Fullscreen mode” is an absolute piece of crap.
As you can see its not really fullscreen. Yes the top bar goes away when you scroll down but because of the giant buttons in the bottom left and right there might as well just be the normal bar there.
Roundup
The one single reason that I can think of for actually using Opera is if you have a limited data plan because by going through its server first it’ll save you a little bit of data. So there are already tons of reviews about Opera mini out there, why bring it up? Because what happened was very interesting. About 24 hours after its release it already has over 10,000 reviews in the app store (granted they’re definitely not all good). Imagine if Fennec (Firefox’s mobile browser) made its way on to the iPhone, the world would explode! They hype for this application was absolutely amazing, Opera did a great job promoting an application that I believe to be absolutely terrible. It really does feel like it was ported directly from Windows Mobile or a Blackberry, you can obviously tell their developers have no Apple experience. Even though it’s this bad, I was blown away when I saw this…bare with me for the scrolling.
What is this exactly? These are pictures I TOOK less than an hour ago of the top free applications in all the different countries store’s. So mainly Opera was the top in ALL the stores and has been for about 5 hours. Well isn’t that interesting Steve Jobs! PEOPLE DO LIKE A CHOICE! WHO WOULD’VE THUNK IT??
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