Overall, I have to say I think the app has some great features, but at the moment it's got too many problems to become my iPhone browser of choice. I'm sure a few of these are bugs that'll be fixed in due course, but there are some design drawbacks that may be more difficult to remedy.
First the good bits:
Speed
It's hard to deny that over a slow connection, this is a quick browser. The compressing of data centrally, reducing the amount of data needed to be transmitted, makes a big difference over GPRS or Edge. Without doubt I will be keeping Opera on my iPhone just for this, as I spend a fair bit of time out of 3G or WiFi range.
Speed Dial
I like this feature on the desktop, but on the iPhone it comes into it's own I think. Quick links to your favourite sites, right there on your home page. No need to add links to your iPhone home screen, or navigate to find bookmarks. Just go where you want straight from the home page. Brilliant.
Unfortunately, I'm afraid I ran out of really good things at this point. Moving on to the problems:
The Interface
I really like the way tabs and settings rise up from the menu bar at the bottom, rather than switching the whole screen. Although frustratingly, detailed preference screens do take the whole screen and tapping 'Back' doesn't take you back to the menu, it closes it. This makes browsing the settings screens to explore the app a painful experience of repeatedly tapping the spanner icon on the main menu bar.
The tabbed browsing interface is frustrating too. You have to tap between tabs rather than flick, which gets increasingly difficult the more tabs you open. Opening a new tab brings up the homepage, but doesn't automatically select the tab. You've got to tap inside the page to bring it to the front and use it. I can't see any situation where I'd want to open a new tab just to have it there and not use it right away. The extra tap is just annoying.
Rendering
The very first site I tried on Opera was the BBC News main page, probably my most regularly visited website. Immediately I was unhappy that I couldn't read anything, not even the headlines which are in a fairly large font, and clearly readable in Safari without zooming. If I can read any part of a page when fully zoomed out, I can't possibly expect to make a decision about which bit to zoom down to. This could be that Opera is using a different rendering engine to Safari and these fonts are being displayed smaller, or it could be something else that's been implemented to speed things up. Either way, for me it's a problem.
Form Input
To be fair, this is probably a bug. But when entering data into a form (I used the facebook login page as an example) my input was not visible once I completed entering it. It was still there, I just couldn't see it! I entered my username 3 times thinking something had gone wrong, until eventually I just moved onto password in the hope it might just work, and it did (well, sort of... see below). This lack of visual feedback on form input is a big deal, especially on any form that has more than 2 elements. I imagine this will be fixed in a future release.
Security
Ok. I said logging into facebook worked, well it almost did. I immediately came to a security screen saying I was accessing the site from a location that was unfamiliar. Strange, yes, but I assumed it was a new mobile browser and maybe facebook was flagging that. I logged onto the site on my computer and it showed that I had tried to log in from Norway at 03:30ish. This was at around 11:30 BST.
Facebook had been entirely correct to flag this, and I denied the access on the basis that it didn't tie up with what I'd attempted. I assume (well, OK, it's pretty obvious) that this is the location and time reported by Opera's compression servers through which all traffic is proxied to the iPhone, and that has some security implications. First of all, there is no SSL or encryption support. So for any kind of secure site access, stick to Safari. Then there's this issue, which for Facebook I could obviously care less about, but for other sites? I don't know. Google defaults to google.com, not .co.uk, which could be more annoying.
So, all in all, I'll be sticking with Safari for 90% of my internet use on the iPhone, saving Opera for those times when I really need to get to a site and don't have 3G. It'll be interesting to see how the browser market on the iPhone picks up now though, given that noone really expected Opera to be approved in the first place. Maybe we'll see a few more entries into the fray in the coming weeks and months...
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