14 DAY TRIAL // On the desktop, Opera is a perennial underdog, it's well respected by those in the know, but not very popular with regular users. But on feature phones, it's a phenomenon, pretty much owning the market.
And, with everyone and their dog gushing over smartphones, most of the people on this planet can't afford one, instead they have a regular "feature" phone. But they still want to use Facebook, Twitter and so on.
Facebook offers a feature phone app, Facebook Zero as well as the mobile site, Twitter has its deals with carriers for SMS support.
But Opera thinks it can do better and in the upcoming Opera 7 Mini, it integrated both social networks straight into the new "home" tab.
The idea is simple, the home tab retrieves the latest updates from these sites and others such as Gmail so you can keep up without actually loading them.
If you don't have the time or the bandwidth to load the full site, a constant stream of updates means that you'll only have to visit if you find something important.
Of course, constant updates don't sound particularly data-saving, but Opera says it has this covered. Thanks to Opera Mini's compression technology each update ends up weighing around 1KB, so 1,000 updates will only eat up 1MB or so of data.
The feature is important because most visits to social networks, Twitter in particular, especially in mobile devices are to check for updates and notifications. Having them brought to your browser's home page will save you a lot of unnecessary visits.
Opera Mini 7 is in testing right now, it's not yet ready for a broad release, but the Opera team is making it available for early adopters via the Next program introduced last summer.
Opera Next builds can be installed alongside the stable ones and can be used to keep up with the latest new features and improvements while still having a stable browser to rely on.