Our Norwegian friends at Opera Software have just announced that their Opera Mini web browser is coming to INQ’s lineup of mobile phones beginning this month. Some background for our readers in parts of the world other than the UK: INQ is a brand of mobile phones created by Hutchison Whampoa, better known as 3. They saw the need to create a class of device that would give people who can’t afford smartphones features such as built in social networking integration, email, instant messaging, those sorts of things. They’ve been doing at awesome job, but they’re competing with both other operators and themselves who have no problem giving consumers high end handsets for next to nothing if they sign the dotted line on a 12 to 24 month contract. Right around Mobile World Congress INQ showed off their very first Android powered devices, whereas up until now they only offered a set of feature phones running on Qualcomm’s Brew operating system.
Combine that mindset of offering smartphone like features for bargin bin prices and you can see why teaming up with Opera makes sense. Their Opera Mini web browser uses server farms in various parts of the world to render the page you want to view and then compress it up nearly 90% before finally spitting it back down to your handset. It allows 3 to build cheap (read: slower) INQ devices and for them to save on infrastructure costs since you’re not going to be using a lot of their bandwidth compared to customers who actually pony up and buy a real man’s smartphone.
The whole concept of INQ would have made a lot more sense if it came out several years earlier, but now it just seems like a waste. With Huawei and ZTE pumping out cheap smartphones, who in their right mind would want something that’s not full featured?