In an interesting press release, Norwegian based Opera Software has announced that next week (February 15th-17th) at the Mobile World Congress being held in Barcelona, Spain, they plan to unveil their Opera Mini Mobile browser for the Apple iPhone.

Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal, but past history has shown that Apple typically denies iPhone applications for software that duplicates functionality that is already provided on the iPhone. In this case, the Opera browser would duplicate the Apple Safari browser.

So what is the point of developing a new browser for the iPhone? According to Opera Software, the Opera browser will not be released to the public. The purpose of it is to only highlight to media types and industry insiders at next weeks conference what an iPhone running a non-native browser would look like.

When pressed further if Opera would submit their new iPhone application for approval or if other distribution methods were being considered (ie think Cydia and jailbroken iPhones), an Opera representative was fairly hush but did offer this tidbit “We hope that Apple will not deny their users a choice in Web browsing experience.” Not very likely that this would be approved, at least not as it stands now but there’s a good chance more is going to come from this next week. Stay tuned, this should get interesting.

Via: Venture Beat