I thought I'd take the time to do a review on Opera Mini for the iPhone. Well, there's finally another browser to actually compete with Safari and that is Opera Mini. If you'd like a quick answer, I'll tell you that I will be sticking with Safari for the majority of my mobile browsing. If you want a more detailed explanation, read on.

The first impression you will get with Opera Mini is that it's extremely snappy. Pages load much, much faster than they do with Safari. You'll also notice that it has a pretty well designed user interface. It does take up a little more room than Safari so pages aren't as great to look at. Plus, if you switch to Fullscreen mode from the Settings, it doesn't really work as you'd expect it to. It becomes more of a hassle to do simple tasks, so I shut it off. Visual tabs and speed dial are two very impressive features. I also really like the ability to find something in a page by searching for it from the Tools menu.

Luckily for Opera, the first impression of Opera Mini is great--but that's about it for me. Once you start to dig deeper into Opera, the more you'll probably get to like Safari. For instance, when the pages load, you'll notice they are far less detailed than Safari when zoomed out. In fact, all text is completely illegible. They are rendered as lines on the page. Once you zoom in completely, it can be read. Speaking of zoom, that's another issue. Using the pinch-to-zoom gesture on Safari actually adjusts the level of zoom you have on the page. On Opera, it's basically just toggling between zoomed in or zoomed out, with no fine adjustments to make.