One of the selling points of Apple's upcoming iPhone is the device's built-in Safari web browser. Unlike other mobile browsers, which truncate pages to make them fit on their host devices' tiny screens, the iPhone flavor of Safari renders full-sized versions of web pages and allows users to zoom in and out to read text or look at pictures. Well, ten days before the iPhone launch, Opera has made a preemptive strike against Apple's device by introducing a new beta version of its Opera Mini browser that boasts similar functionality:

The Opera Mini 4 beta works with a wide range of smart phones and is freely available as a 117KB download from the WAP page mini.opera.com/beta. Of course, most smart phones lack a touch screen, a shortcoming for which Opera's new software compensates by implementing a virtual cursor. Users can control the cursor with either their phone's direction keys or with the numeric keypad, which allows for faster scrolling and zooming. It's also possible to disable the new zoom mode and display pages in traditional, truncated fashion.