Opera Mini has been a long time in the making, almost two years in fact. We all knew this day would come and it is with some trepidation that we now await its prognosis. Apple doesn’t allow Apps on the App Store which replicate the functions of existing native applications, that includes Safari, which is a shame since the video herein suggests Opera Mini is super fast in comparison.

There are alternative browsers on the App Store but these are all forced to use Safari’s underlying code, in fact they are essentially re-themed versions of Safari some with additional features. In February Opera Software officially announced that it had made a version of Opera Mini for the iPhone and offered a sneak preview of the App at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona at which stage the App wasn’t commercially available or even complete.

Today the preview video below was released demonstrating Opera Mini’s very impressive features, namely tab management and incredible speed. Its best to let the video do the talking but it is suffice to say that it blows the native Safari App out of the water. Opera Mini uses server-side rendering to significantly compress data before it reaches the iPhone resulting in lightening quick loading times and less data usage. The video even goes as far as to demonstrate a head-to-head between Opera Mini and Safari.

Opera Software made quite a big deal of the fact that they would eventually be submitted the App for App Store approval in a ruse to gain both momentum in advertising and as a call-out to Apple over the fact that they have made a point so far of categorically rejected submissions of Apps similar in nature. Of course Apple refuted this claim.

Well, today saw judgment day. Opera Mini has officially been submitted to the App Store for approval and the Opera Mini site now shows a rather funny count-up of guess how long it will take for Apple to approve the submission. The person who guesses closest wins a brand new iPhone. Seeing as how Apple has recently greatly revamped is approval process resulting in the approval of Apps in as little as a couple of hours as of late as opposed to the 3 months of old, it will be interesting to see how long Opera await a response. If guessing ‘never’ were an option I’d have submitted my guess already.

In all seriousness, I am praying this App makes it through the approval process as it looks brilliant and if performs as well as this video would suggest, browsing is set to become a whole lot less stressful. Make sure to check out the video below to see Opera Mini in action.