Opera is a name familiar to the mobile world for bringing desktop-style browsing to a wide variety of phones.
In some unexpected news, Opera just announced that they have developed a version of their “mini” browser for the iPhone, and will be showing it off at Mobile World Congress next week as they wait for approval from the App store.

Now, this is very odd news for a variety of reasons.

To start, Apple is infamous for their strict “duplication of services” policy on the App store… it seems kind of arrogant of Opera to think that Apple would approve them, when they have denied every other browser, music player, etc that offers some sort of alternative to a key feature of the device.

Beyond that, Opera’s choice of using their “Mini” app seems confusing as well… Their browser traditionally comes in two flavors: Opera Mobile, and Opera Mini.
For phones that are powerful enough to support it, Opera developed the Mobile version, which is a native app based on their desktop rendering engine (Yes- they do in fact have a desktop browser, a lot of people seem to not know that). It comes pre-installed on many current Windows Phones, supports many browser plugins such as Flash, and can easily be made the default browser on the device.

The “Mini” version, however, is a solution for standard phones that are otherwise deemed not powerful enough to have anything resembling a desktop browser experience. Using a clever trick that resembles remote desktop access, Opera Mini doesn’t actually connect directly to the internet. It connects to Opera’s servers (located in the Netherlands, I believe), which load and render the page, then send a snapshot of it to the handset which can be viewed, scrolled, and clicked just as if they were using it locally. Since this server side compression takes the bulk of the work off the handset, the end result is a page that loads in seconds, and looks like a desktop browser- even on something as simple as a Motorola RAZR.
The lightweight mini version is also not traditionally a native app, preferring to exist as a device-agnostic Java application so it can work on almost any legacy phone out there.

So why does Opera think they can get through the store this time, and why did they choose the “Mini” version as opposed to the Mobile? Clearly, the iPhone is capable of running a full blown desktop browser experience as evidenced by Safari?

I think the two questions together may yield the answer: Opera Mobile on the iPhone would clearly be a duplication of services, since it works so similarly to Safari. However Mini, with its unique server-side compression, is a completely different animal. The result to the user may be a fast loading webpage, however since it doesn’t actually connect directly to the site, some interactive elements of web pages do not respond as expected (sort of like browsing a super fast cached version). Therefore, it could be seen as an interesting web application for large sites that bog the iPhone down, but perhaps not a replacement for Safari.

Could that be their reasoning? And better yet, will Apple buy into it?

Or is Opera just trying to shake things up?