Google Targets Emerging Markets with Google News for Opera Mini

The mobile space is very hot right now, but developers are usually focusing on the latest and greatest smartphones and the powerful apps and websites that run on them. It's easy to forget that, for most of the world, smartphones aren't a reality and most phones are very basic.

What the US calls 'feature phones' are considered high end in Africa, many parts of Asia and in plenty of other places. What's more, limited devices with simple browsers are the only means of connecting to the web for many.

With the number of phones in the world getting close to the number of people, the market and its potential are huge.

So it's really no surprise that Google is targeting these phones and markets with its latest mobile offering, Google News for Opera Mini.

"While the Google News team has been hard at work redesigning our service for smartphones, we’ve also been thinking about our milllions of users around the world who access the web not from a smartphone, but from a feature phone, using Opera Mini as their browser," Arun Prasath, Tech Lead and Dimitris Meretakis, Product Manager at Google, wrote.

"So we have rolled out a redesigned Google News for Opera Mini in all 29 languages and 70 editions of Google News," they announced.

And it also shouldn't be much of a surprise that Google is offering a version optimized for Opera Mini in particular. While the Norwegian browser maker may be the underdog on the desktop, it's dominating on mobile phones.

Opera Mini is by far the most popular browser on feature phones and is used by tens of millions around the world. A website optimized for it makes sense, even more so because Opera Mini is not your average browser.

Websites actually pass through Opera's severs first where they are compressed and optimized for the phones they're destined for. Knowing this, there are plenty of things to do to optimize a website particularly for Opera Mini ahead of time. You can read about some of the changes which include article thumbnails, better text snippets, a search bar and other enhancements, here.