Last month at MWC 2010, Opera Software showed off their Opera Mini for iPhone, and while at South by Southwest Interactive, Harry McCracken of pcworld managed to get a little hands-on playtime with Opera Mini for iPhone and has come up with his first impressions.
Apparently Opera Mobile has told him that they are working on the final touches and that Opera Mini for iPhone should hit the Apple iTunes App Store quite soon.
Opera Mini’s main feature is its speediness due to server side compression which squeezes the web page before it hit the mobile browser, and in playing with Opera Mini for iPhone , he says it didn’t fell “particularly zippy” and loaded the NYT page slower than Safari.
The reason for this according to an Opera rep is that compression is still going on at the servers in Norway and thus tends to slow things down a tad.
The reviewer also says that Opera Mini doesn’t try to match the desktop type accuracy that iPhone Safari does and thus displays a rough approximation, and maybe doesn’t offer the ability to play YouTube videos like Safari, although he does finalise by say that by Opera submitting Opera Mini for iPhone to Apple they are doing owners of the iPhone a big favour.