The folks at Opera were nice enough to confirm the soon availability of the Opera browser for the Apple iPhone. Maybe next week or with the release of the iPhone SDK. Also at CES, the Norwegian company launched Opera 9 for devices running Linux, based on the same core engine as the desktop browser and that could be used in portable media players like the ones built by Archos as well as set top boxes. It's based on the same core engine as the Opera desktop browser and ships with an SDK for developers to adapt it to their devices. A move similar to Mozilla's launch of Mobile Firefox.

"Firefox comes from a very desktop centric world and we have been on the embedded side for many many years. We have a strong handling of the memory techniques, small footprint and efficiency on using the CPU cycles as little as possible", said David Rosén, a software engineer at Opera.

Rosén's video interview after the jump.