Opera Coast web browser now available for iPhone

Opera on Thursday announced the launch of Opera Coast web browser 3.0, which is a universal app bringing the browser to the iPhone for the first time. Opera Coast was first launched for the iPad in September, intended as a new way for users to interact with their browsers. The iPhone version will work in a similar fashion on the smaller screen. The browser syncs across the phone and tablet, saving your bookmarks and preferences.

Coast is designed almost entirely with gesture-based interaction in mind, and mostly does away with buttons and tabs, giving you more space for content on screen.

For instance, instead of a dedicated address bar, there is a home button, which you can long press to return to the home screen, or tap to enter a search term or a URL. The home screen is a simple grid with large icons for your most visited pages - like the speed dial on other browsers.

Similarly, you can tap a small button at the bottom of the screen to see all recent sites, instead of relying on a back button to navigate. To close a page, you can just swipe up to close it instead of having to dismiss it by pressing another button. The interface is similar to Apple's multitasking interface.

There's a lot of emphasis on gestures as well. Swiping a page from the left or right go back and forward respectively, while swiping down from the top reloads a page.

While there's no denying that Coast is a great looking browser, many competitors also include full screen browsing as a matter of course, and even defaults like Safari hide the navigation bar as you scroll through a page.

Coast is definitely a good looking option, but if you're looking for features such as compression to reduce data usage, or pre-caching for faster loading, then you should look to competitors like UC Browser or Opera's own Opera Mini instead. Though since Opera Coast is free, you could check it out and see if you like what it has to offer.