Opera Mini, our favorite non-smartphone mobile web browser, has taken one more step to going gold today. A new Opera Mini beta has been released, giving Opera’s 20 million-strong installed user-base, not to mention new users, a chance to put a desktop web browsing experience on their dumbphone.
The new Opera Mini beta boasts the return of the skinning feature and improved video performance. Perhaps more importantly, Opera has flipped the switch on a new server farm that should make for speedier mobile web browsing in the US and Asia.
Opera Mini manages to deliver a desktop-like web browsing experience on feature phones, with less processing power than their smartphone counterparts, by offloading the page-rendering process to proxy servers. Opera Mini sends all webpages through its server farms for off-handset processing. These servers render the page in full desktop-format and send along the resulting data to a mobile phone – with the user never being the wiser.
Until today, Opera’s proxy servers based in Norway, making round-trip times for webpage data a bit longer for US and Asian customers. Today, with the launch of the new server farm, Opera will look to serve fully-rendered webpages to its Opera Mini fleet with less latency and faster turnaround times.
“The number of people using Opera Mini worldwide proves that there is a
true revolution going on: people want to access all their favorite Web
sites on the mobile phone they have today,” says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO,
Opera. “We constantly focus on developing a faster and more personal
browsing experience. Opera Mini 4.2 beta is an update that takes mobile
Web browsing to the next level.”
Who says smartphones have all the web browsing fun? Grab the new Opera Mini beta today!