Approved: Opera Mini for iPhone and iPod Touch [Updated]

Here it is, the day you’ve been waiting for … Opera Mini has been approved for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Opera has just issued a press release indicating that, in a word: “Approved.” Just two weeks ago Opera indicated that it was submitting their version of their famed mobile browser for consideration to the iTunes App Store. Since then, many people have speculated that it wouldn’t be approved, after all – how could it be? The SDK has specific limitations barring a true browser competitor to Safari in the App Store. Sure, there are lots of browsers in the App Store, but every one of them uses the Safari engine under the hood.

Opera is probably best known for their speedy browser page loads via their acceleration technology and server side rendering engine. It still remains to be seen just how well the Opera browser does for browsing the web on the iPhone, but early indicators suggest that it is at least faster than Safari. Now if the experience overall is better then it will be a true Safari killer. Here at AppChatter we’re still waiting for it to hit the U.S. iTunes store, which should be anytime now… (though, Apple releases to the U.S. iTunes store on Tuesdays).

Earlier today, Opera announced that they have 100 millions users on Opera Browser with over half of them on mobile devices.

Update: Well, I’ve been using it now for a bit and my initial reaction is…. meh. It is faster, for sure, but that’s about it. Rendering is lacking as it missing spacing or justification on a lot of text and at zoomed out nothing is legible – at all. You have to zoom in to read anything. In landscape mode the page displayed is still the same width at portrait mode and there’s no easy way to make it just fill the width of the landscape space unless you reload the page. Check the gallery below for some real screen shots. Well, that was fun….