Opera’s published their latest State of the Mobile report, this time for the month of September, and numbers don’t lie. People love Opera Mini, the application that takes the websites you want to read and compresses them on some far away server in the tiny country of Norway before pumping it back down to your handset, saving you bandwidth costs, time, and battery life. At the end of last month there were 71.2 million people using Opera Mini, up 100% from a year ago, and they cranked through 36.9 billion pages, again up almost 150% over last year. The Apple iPhone is the most popular handset where Opera Mini is installed, both in the United States and in the United Kingdom. We’re not surprised after the demo we saw in February and then the final release later in the Spring. The whole of the EU however paints a different picture. The top 10 devices in the top 10 EU countries show that of those 100 devices, 67 of them were made by Nokia, again no surprise since it’s bundled with practically every S40 phone, 14 of them were produced by Sony Ericsson, 10 were the “Jesus Phone”, 5 were various BlackBerry models, 3 were made by LG, and only 1 was a Samsung.
“Keeping costs low is about more than just saving money; it is about making the Web more accessible to a wider range of people,” said Jon von Tetzchner, pictured above, Co-founder, Opera. “That is why we focus so heavily on making Opera Mini work on all phones, and, in fact, why we originally founded Opera. We believe access to the Web is a universal right, and we hope that by keeping costs low, we play a part in helping people connect, on any device, wherever they are.”
Jon is of course talking about the sad reality of operators still charging obscene prices for data. It’s come down from where it was, that’s for sure, but with unlimited data plans looking like they’ll soon be on the chopping block, both in the United States and abroad, penny pinching may become the new normal.