Blackberry Mobility Featured Article

Opera Software has announced that its mobile web browser, Opera Mini, is helping cell phone users in the top ten countries to save approximately $8.1 billion per year.

Most of those who are saving money that way are in the United States and the U.K. 

Opera Mini is compressed up to 90 percent, so the usage consumes less bandwidth and saves money for the user, according to Opera. 

Users of Opera Mini have reportedly generated nearly 227 million MB of data for operators worldwide in September 2009. That means Opera Mini servers processed up to 2.1 petabytes of data in September. 

Since August, the data consumed went up by 8.7 percent.

In September 2009, more than 35.6 million people used Opera Mini, an 11.5 percent increase from August 2009 and more than 150 percent compared to September 2008, said the Norwegian technology firm in a press release.


"On an average day, Opera Mini users view 500 million Web pages on their phones," the company stated. 

The top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage are Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, South Africa, United States, United Kingdom, Poland and Vietnam. Vietnam joins the top 10 countries for the first time, as Nigeria falls from the top 10.

To calculate these numbers, Opera says, it looked at the top operators in each country, determined how much they typically charge per MB of browsing, and averaged those figures together. The average cost of browsing in each country was multiplied by the amount of traffic generated in each country, and the resulting totals were summed and compared to the totals for uncompressed data traffic.

“Our survey only reflects metered rates (cost per MB), not flat-rate subscription options,” the company stated.

Nokia and Sony Ericsson are by far the most popular handset brands chosen by Opera Mini users.

“More than half the world’s population has a mobile phone. By making the mobile Web more affordable and available on almost any mobile phone, we help democratize it,” said Jon von Tetzchner (News - Alert), CEO, Opera. “This means we can expand the reach of the Web in a way that defies imagination.”