Indeed, if the iPhone was sufficiently powerful, it would be faster to do do the transformations locally.

edit: this is not a swipe at the iPhone, but support for the statement that using Opera's severs is not a functional requirement.

I don't think it's taken as a swipe at the iPhone, more that I think doing it locally would remove any performance/speed gains that it provides. Granted, you could still cache a certain amount of data locally, but browsers do that anyway.

That's rather my point. If the phone was sufficiently powerful, you wouldn't lose any performance gains. I'm implicitly defining sufficiently powerful to be however powerful the iPhone would need to be to see no performance drop.

Once we assume the CPU and memory of the iPhone can handle it, doing it that way would be faster since there would be less latency involved.