We already know that there is an iPhone SDK in the works, and Apple plans to have it available for developers next month. And there is a pretty good chance that we’ll see something about it this week, if not today during Steve Job’s MacWorld 2008 keynote.
My question is, once the SDK is available will we see an Opera browser on the iPhone? I’ve not had any problems surfing with my iPhone, aside from the occasional “safari could not open the page because the server stopped responding” error message. If my experience is already good, could it get better?
One of the iPhone’s much publicized drawbacks is the lack of 3G. For those of us stuck on the Edge network, Opera Mini might be a good solution. For those of you that don’t know, Opera Mini basically sends all request through a server at Opera’s location. The server optimizes the website for your phone, and then sends it back to you much faster. After using Opera Mini on my old Moto Razr, there was no way I was going back to it’s built in browser. It made that much of a difference.
Opera Mini has a number of other nice features that you can read about here. However one of the key features may actually prevent Opera Mini from coming to the iPhone. Buttons. Opera Mini was designed for your normal phone, you know, one that has buttons. With the iPhone, there are no buttons to click, which means no speed dial and no quick browsing key strokes. Sure, everything could be menu driven, actually it would almost have to be.
Then there is Opera Mobile. It’s basically the desktop browser, that has been tweaked a bit to run on mobile phones. Unlike Opera’s other products, Opera Mobile isn’t free. It cost $24.00 USD, which puts it out of the rumored price range for iPhone apps ($9 max). Would Opera be willing to drop the price in order to get their product on one of the hottest gadgest?
As with Opera Mini, Opera Mobile suffers from the lack of physical buttons. I have no idea how much tweaking would be involved, the question is would they be willing to do it. Or is there another option? iOpera? Opera iBrowser? Basically a new Opera Browser built specifically for the iPhone. Something that looks at the iPhone as a whole new platform to expand upon rather than being just a mobile device. They did it with the Nintendo Wii, why not do it with the iPhone?
I’d have no problem buying Opera for the iPhone. Heck, I purchased the desktop browser for years. I firmly believe that if they build it, others will come.
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Tags: Apple, AT&T, iPhone, MacWorld, Nintendo, Opera, Opera Mini, Opera Mobile, Safari, SDK, web browser, Wii