Opera has released a new mobile phone browser that can zoom in and out of a page like on the Nintendo Wii.

Combined with a cheap mobile phone it is the "iPhone for the poor man today", according to Opera's vice president of engineering, Christen Krogh.

This is because phones using the browser will be able to surf the net faster than Apple's iPhone can, despite the iPhone using relatively high-bandwidth Wi-Fi to transfer data.

To back up his claims, Krogh demonstrated a GPRS enabled phone downloading a website at a comparable rate to a video of the iPhone doing the same when Steve Jobs demonstrated it in January.

Opera Mini 4 uses server-side compression techniques that render websites for a small screen on Opera's servers before sending them to a mobile phone at 5-20 per cent of the original size.

Pages have their original layout plus there's support for Flash 7 animations. Krogh said transfer times are "a bit faster as well" compared with the Mini 3.

Opera Mini 4 is available today as a free beta download. A final version of the software will be available over the summer.

The company is also proud to announce that Opera Mini, present on 15 million unique phones, is more widely used than Apple's Safari browser… in the Ukraine.

Perhaps Opera's sniping at Apple is because it sees the iPhone as a threat, since it's a closed device that probably won't ever feature Opera's software.