Launched in 2006, Opera Mini retrieves web pages via Opera’s own servers, which compress web pages by up to 90% before sending them on to mobiles.
The compression means Opera Mini is three times faster and uses 10% of the data than other mobile browsers – such as your phone’s existing browser.
One tenth of the data means one tenth of the data charges; Opera Mini is designed to bring you the internet cheaply and quickly.
A United Nations report recently found that by 2013 mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most popular way to access the internet. With Opera Mini, you don’t need a PC or even a smartphone to be part of the mobile internet revolution, because Opera’s servers reformat web pages for small screens and mobiles that were originally not designed with internet access in mind.
In fact, Opera Mini is available for feature phones running Java, iPhones, Androids, Symbian/S60 phones, Black Berries, and Windows Mobile phones. Feature phones running Java account for 70% of all mobile phones in the world, so they should be available in your neighbourhood.
At The Zimbabwean we have been using Opera Mini for over a year now, and it is easily the fastest mobile web browser we have tried – browsing the internet on a normal mobile phone can even be faster than on an iPhone. We particularly like that Opera Mini saves our bookmarks, home pages, and search engines, keeping them backed up and synchronized. This means if you use the full Opera browser on a PC, or if you lose your phone, you will have all your bookmarks waiting for you the next time you use Opera: you don’t lose your data.
Opera Mini also has a full screen mode that takes advantage of every pixel on your screen by removing the address bar and toolbar until they are needed, allowing you to see more of the page you are viewing.
On November 2011, Opera reported 144.6 million unique Opera Mini active users – an 80.6% increase since November 2010. It is one of the fastest growing mobile browsers in the world, and keeps getting better as updates are released several times a year.
Post published in: Business