The App Store in iTunes, has a web browsing app that competes with Apple products, giving users a new choice in the web browsers they use on their iPhone. This makes the Norwegian company’s software the first product that Apple has approved that directly competes with one of Apple’s core iPhone functions.

“We are delighted to offer iPhone and iPod Touch users a great browsing experience with the Opera Mini App,” said Lars Boilesen, chief executive of Opera. “This app is another step toward Opera’s goal of bringing the Web to more people in more places.”

Having Opera Mini in the App Store means that iPhone users now have a choice: the Safari browser that comes bundled with the iPhone or the Opera Mini web browser. More importantly, the door has now been opened for other developers, such as Google and Mozilla, to develop and apply for permission to distribute their products in iTunes.

Opera claims that their browser will surf the web up to six times faster than Apple’s Safari . Independent tests by Eric Zeman, a writer for Information Week, have shown that it is not only faster than Safari but also faster than the native browser on Google’s Android.

Opera uses a “sleight of hand” trick to achieve this great speed increase. Opera calls their app a web browser, but it is actually a proxy browser. When you open a web site, the Opera Mini app sends a request for the web page to Opera’s server. The server retrieves the page from the Internet, compresses it by up to 90 percent, and then sends a compressed image of the page to the Opera Mini app on your iPhone.

However, The Opera Mini app does have a downside. The first thing users will notice is that Opera does not support the pinch-to-zoom feature of the iPhone. Also, Opera Mini is only for basic web browsing. Audio, video, and Flash are not supported.

Overall, the Safari browser is better, but Opera Mini does fill a niche. It allows fast web browsing, even when the faster 3G network is not available and your iPhone is connected to the older, slower Edge Network.

A video demo is available on YouTube at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpTCS3g-cBY