Posts Tagged ‘Opera Mini’
Approved! Opera Mini Is In The Apple App Retailer.
Opera just announced that their popular Mini mobile browser is now finally available for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Opera has been tearing up the mobile browsing market, with more than 50 million users at present, and millions more now sure to come.
Lars Boilesen, CEO of Opera Software is quoted as saying We are delighted to offer iPhone and iPod touch users a great browsing experience with the Opera Mini App.
More info, screenshots and a video after the jump.
For those of you pinching pennies, or on a data package that isnt unlimited, youll be pleased to know that Opera uses compression methods that allow you to view a full website, yet download noticeably less data. This also serves as great information for those unlucky enough to be stuck on AT&Ts Edge connection, which is notoriously slow with large data transmissions.
So get to the App Store, grab the free Opera Mini (it will be available in the next 24 hours) and let us know what you think of it. We expect to see some great comments about this!
Whats that? You want a video demo? Why sure!
Opera Submits Browser For Iphone Approval
(CNN) — Web browser company Opera has submitted an app for the iPhone that it promises will make surfing on the device faster — if Apple allows it.
The Norwegian company said Tuesday morning that it has handed over its Mini smartphone browser for consideration by Apple’s App Store.
The announcement came after a months-long promotional campaign and will test Apple, whose Safari software is the iPhone’s default browser.
Apple has had a widely acknowledged practice of denying apps that compete with features already on the phone.
Opera demonstrated the iPhone app — which it claims will be up to six times faster than Safari in loading some Web pages — at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, in February and at the South by Southwest Interactive festival this month in Austin, Texas.
“The Opera Mini for iPhone sneak peek during MWC told us that we have something special,” said John von Tetzchner, co-founder of Opera Software, in a written statement.
“Opera has put every effort into creating a customized, stylized, feature-rich and highly responsive browser that masterfully combines iPhone capabilities with Opera’s renowned Web experience, and the result is a high-performing browser for the iPhone.”
Apple, located in Cupertino, California, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment early Tuesday morning.
In the smartphone market, Opera currently is available on BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm and Android platforms.
Opera Mini also runs on the Symbian platform and is huge on non-smartphone mobiles, accounting for many of its more than 50 million monthly users worldwide, according to the company.
But the company clearly covets the iPhone’s devoted and active user base.
At South by Southwest, Opera spokesman Thomas Ford told CNN that his company’s very public rollout hasn’t been an effort to pressure Apple into approving the app.
But the company is calling attention to its showdown with Apple over the mobile browser. On Opera’s Web site, there’s a page with a ticker showing, up to the second, how long it’s been since the company submitted its app to Apple.
While the Apple store has never approved a Web browser that renders results without relying on Safari’s inner workings, Opera maintains the two are different enough. The company says Safari is better for complicated Web functions, while Opera specializes in quickly opening basic Web pages.
If approved, Opera Mini would not replace Safari on iPhones but would give users who downloaded it a choice between the two browsers. Opera has not announced pricing for the app, although Mini is free on other phones.
Anticipation in the tech world over how the showdown will shake out had already ramped up Tuesday morning.
“Whatever happens, this is going to be good,” said writer Thomas Ricker on the tech blog Engadget.
Iphone Browsing To Be Faster With Opera — If Apple Approves
CNN will have complete coverage of the 2010 South by Southwest Interactive Conference at www.cnn.com/TECH and @cnntech on Twitter.
Austin, Texas (CNN) — The company behind the Web browser Opera is weeks away from submitting it to Apple’s iPhone store for approval, a spokesman said Friday.
The result, according to the Norwegian company, would be a browser up to six times faster than the iPhone’s default Web tool, Safari.
The question raised by the plans — and the major publicity push Opera made last month at the Mobile World Conference in Barcelona, Spain — is whether Apple will approve the application — in effect creating competition for its own product.
At the South By Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Opera spokesman Thomas Ford demonstrated for CNN the Opera Mini app being developed for the iPhone.
“I can’t positively say the time frame, but I can say it’s very soon,” Ford said when asked when the app would be officially submitted to Apple. Asked whether it would be weeks or months, he said “weeks.”
In the smartphone market, Opera currently is available on BlackBerry, Windows Mobile and Android platforms. Opera Mini is huge on non-smartphone mobile phones, accounting for much of its more than 50 million monthly users worldwide, according to the company.
But the company clearly covets the iPhone’s devoted and active user base.
At the Barcelona conference, the company pushed Opera Mini hard — an unusual approach for an application that hasn’t yet been submitted, much less approved.
But Ford downplayed the notion that the push was meant to put pressure on Apple.
“This is a very, very complete beta,” he said. “We were definitely ready to show it to people. We wanted people to see what it would do.”
Apple did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment for this report.
While developers have sometimes complained that the Cupertino, California-based computer giant’s standards for apps are sometimes hard to understand, Apple has been consistently clear on one point — apps aren’t accepted if they duplicate a function the iPhone already does.
Opera argues that Mini and Safari are different, saying Opera Mini is quicker at downloading regular Internet pages while Safari’s design makes it more apt for more data-intensive functions, such as editing a Google document.
Opera’s process involves running Web pages through their servers, stripping away all but the most essential data so the pages load quickly.
Whether that’s enough of a distinction for Apple to allow another Web browser onto the iPhone remains to be seen.
“I wouldn’t say we’re trying to back Apple into a corner,” Ford said. “We feel that we’re very much following their rules.”
Source: www.cnn.com