Our Norwegian friends at Opera Software have released their latest State of the Mobile Web Report, an analysis of data gathered from everyone who uses the Opera Mini web browser. For those who have never heard of Opera Mini, it’s an ingenious little application that takes websites you want to view and renders them on a remote server, compresses them by up to 90%, and then spits them back down to your handset. I was a huge Opera Mini user back when phones had anemic processors, networks were slow, and screens were small. Their browser made surfing the real world wide web actually useful. As time went on however more and more websites started making their websites optimized for mobile devices, screens eventually got larger, processors in today’s phones now rival my personal computer from a few years back, and operators are launching 4G, which means I’m not longer an Opera Mini user, but I still recommend it to people who have feature phones or don’t have a data plan and pay per megabyte.
Now that we’ve got that introduction out of the way, let’s get to some stats:
- There are now 90.36 million Opera Mini users, a tremendous increase from the 40.6 million users one year ago.
- Those users viewed 52.3 billion web pages in January, up 124.2% from the same time last year.
- In one month alone Opera’s servers spit out 804 million MB of data, up 138.5% from last year.
- The most popular device running Opera Mini in America is the iPhone, and among the top 10 most popular devices Mini in the USA 6 of them are various BlackBerry models from RIM.
- The average American consumed 438 web pages and only 10 MB of data in January.
When you combine the amount of people using Opera Mini with the people using Opera Mobile, a dedicated browser that doesn’t rely on server compression, then there are over 100 million people in the world using Opera’s browsers. Impressive to say the least.