One of its best features being the automatic reformatting of text columns in websites so they fit on your phone’s screen regardless of its orientation. This makes reading on it fantastic, as scrolling left and right continually is just not required, as it so commonly is with the N97′s built in web browser.

Anyway, it turns out the iPhone is getting the Opera Mini goodness shortly.

Well, that is the optimisitic view point at least. Opera have submitted the browser to the Apple App Store and are now just awaiting confirmation that the App will go live. They have even put up a counter stating the amount of “Time since Opera Mini was submitted”. As of typing this, the counter currently stands at just over ten hours.

Apparently, whoever guesses closest to the time at which Opera Mini goes live can win a new iPhone. Interesting. It seems to me that Opera Mini breaches Apple’s own terms which state that submitted applications should not duplicate existing or ‘built in’ iPhone functionality… such as web browsing, which Safari already does.

“Your move Apple” says an article on Mashable, and rightly so. Let’s hope their move is the right one for their users – choice.

What do you think? Is this counter the real deal or merely a marketing ploy and a bit of a stab at Apple? Will Opera Mini really get accepted to the App store?

“Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps”

The iPhone apps, when scaled up to iPad’s larger screen, did not live up to Steve Jobs’ expectation, so due to this, they were scraped from the iPad’s release operating systems. Rumours exist that these apps will be added in a later update to the iPad’s operating system. This is quite important too, as the missing applications are simple and rather fundamental computing programs which I would personal expect to be in any modern general purpose device.

Missing Apps on the iPad

The list of applications scraped from the iPad’s operating system is as follows.

1. Clock – Something as important as the clock application is missing?
2. Calculator – Surely a similar app will be released to compensate the lack of a Calculator app?
3. Weather – No doubt a good third-party whether app will take the place of this if no official weather application is released.
4. Voice Memos – Seems it should still be in there? Why remove it?
5. Stocks – Not fundamental to all users by any means, but should still be a nice default.

Questions for existing iPhone users:

• Why would Apple really want these applications removed other than merely that they look ‘weird’?
• If you had an iPad, would you want these applications to be there as standard? If so, which ones?
• Are these applications (on the iPhone) used regularly and important to you already?