Opera Mini was well optimized for cellphones of the time and bandwidth limited cellphone plans, but Apple’s deal with AT&T to allow unlimited bandwidth flipped a lot of those design decisions on their head. IMO what really separated the iPhone’s browser was a larger screen + better UI + better rendering + unlimited bandwidth meant it could just be used to casually browse the web.
Opera Turbo was always disabled on my phone, never needed it. But I never used GPRS, only EDGE and later.
The iPhone was released June 29, 2007 but announced in January. “On 7 November 2007, Opera Mini 4 was released. According to Johan Schön, technical lead of Opera Mini development, the entire code was rewritten.[28] Opera Mini 4 includes the ability to view web pages similarly to a desktop based browser by introducing Overview and Zoom functions, and a landscape view setting. In Overview mode, the user can scroll a zoomed-out version of certain web pages.[29] Using a built-in pointer, the user can zoom into a portion of the page to provide a clearer view”
Hmm, perhaps I had a beta version of that. I definitely had it before the iPhone came out. Or it might have been a different browser? Not sure.
Mobile hardware wasn't capable of delivering such smoothness. Apple's innovation was to prioritize UI rendering over everything else. When you're zooming, rendering stops and browser only deals with zooming. Regardless of current CPU capabilities and load, scrolling and zooming is always smooth. And turns out people care about those way more than parallel rendering.
That's some underappreciated outside of the box thinking.
You call it innovative, I call it draconian anti-consumer walled garden that needs to be eliminated
That said, the LG Prada beat the iPhone to market by a month but the iPhone was in development for longer. What’s really interesting is the LG Prada II included a physical keyboard showing they where backing away from the design rather than doubling down.