The wait is over. Opera Mini 6 for iOS is finally here. Back in March, Opera Software released Opera Mini 6 and Opera Mobile 11 for a host of platforms including Android and Symbian. However, iPhone and iPad users were left in the lurch as Opera awaited App Store approval from Apple.

The iOS edition benefits from the same improvements that Opera introduced to other mobile platforms. The new release is optimized for the higher resolution offered by iPhone 4 and the iPad. It also features a super smooth and fast pan and zoom. The shades of red that have long characterized Opera’s mobile releases have made way for sleek black gradients, the menus has been redesigned, and a new share button has been added. It’s now possible to share the web page you are currently surfing on My Opera, Facebook, Twitter and vKontakte.

Opera Mini offers a faster alternative to the excellent Safari browser that every iOS device ships with. The restrictive nature of the App Store ToS (Terms of Service) makes it impossible for third parties to publish browsers that don’t use the inbuilt Safari rendering engine. Opera Mini skirts around this restriction by offloading all the code crunching to its remote servers. When you request a web page, that web page is rendered on Opera’s servers, and a highly compressed static representation of the page is sent back to the browser. This can significantly speed up browsing on slower networks, and also save bandwidth. However, it also has some notable disadvantages. Opera Mini’s handling of dynamic webpages is clumsy. For example, every time you click on a link that performs some JavaScript action, the entire is reloaded as the script is run on Opera’s servers and the result is sent back to your device. Nevertheless, Opera Mini does have some nifty features like save, text search, opera link (profile synchronization), and speed dials (visual bookmarks) that makes it a worthwhile alternative. You can grab the latest version from the App Store.