iPhone: World’s #3 most popular mobile phone running Opera Mini. Beats Blackberry by some margin

In a report published by Opera, the iPhone has become the third-most popular mobile phone to run Opera Mini barely over two weeks after it was launched in Apple’s App Store.

The report, called State of the Mobile Web Report, published monthly by Opera, provides information on the top global trends affecting mobile Web.

With the Opera Mini mobile browser being the world’s most downloaded free app in Apple’s App stores worldwide, its pretty obvious that iPhone users want or at least welcome the option to run an alternative browser on their device.

In fact, the Opera Mini is such a popular app on the iPhone that it is currently the #1 device used by Opera Mini users in the United States, well ahead of BlackBerry (which previously occupied the top spot).

Globally, the iPhone currently ranks #3 most popular device running the mobile browser. In case you’re wondering, all the other top 20 devices are from Nokia and Sony Ericsson handsets.

The breakdown of the top 10 handsets for Opera Mini downloads are as follows (in order): Nokia 6300, Nokia N70, Nokia 3110c, Nokia N73, Nokia 5130 XpressMusic, Nokia 5800d, Nokia 7210, Nokia 6600, Nokia 2600c, Nokia E63.

It’s amazing to see how Opera Mini has made such an impact on iPhone users. We’re tried the browser ourselves and although there are some features that we find tremendously useful like speed dial, in browser text find and a much better tab browsing experience compared to the native Mobile Safari browser; the Opera Mini is still a little rough around the edges with inconsistent rendering of pages and a few other niggles here and there that needs fixing.

But it’s still early days for the browser and we’d expect with future updates, the Opera Mini can and will trully rival Mobile Safari on the iPhone.

Since we’re talking about the Opera Mini, do you have problems loading pages while using the browser on your iPhone? We’ve found the solution. Check out the video here.

View the latest report here.

[opera press release]