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Norway-based Opera Software ASA's mobile browsers -- Opera Mini 4 (currently in beta for Mini 5) and Opera Mobile 10 -- are the world's most used cell phone browsers. One of the key challenges to Opera's mobile market share over the past couple years has been Safari, the browser used on the iPhone.

Traditionally Apple did not allow third-party browsers on the iPhone. It recently relaxed these restrictions allowing third-party browsers -- but only those based on webkit. Now Opera has offered a sneak peak of Opera Mini on the iPhone, leaving many unanswered questions.

Opera Mini is based on the Presto layout engine, not Webkit, and is underpinned by Java ME API calls. Opera has already been welcomed on less unrestrictive platforms, such as Google's Android OS (which uses an emulation layer to translate the Java API calls to appropriate Android API calls). However, it seems pretty amazing if Apple actually allows Opera Mini -- a huge threat to its big mobile browsing market share -- on the iPhone.