14 DAY TRIAL // Today, Norwegian software company Opera unveiled some details on the usage of its Opera Mini browser during the month of February 2011.
According to the company's State of the Mobile Web, Opera Mini had a number of 89.8 million users last month, marking a 0.6 percent decrease when compared to the previous month.
However, the number of Opera Mini users increased significantly when compared to the same month a year ago. The total growth was of 77.5 percent, the company notes.
During February 2011, Opera Mini users viewed over 51.5 billion pages. The mobile browser compressed over 7.3 petabytes of operator data, the company announced.
When compared to January, the number of page views went down 1.6 percent. However, page views went up 133.6 percent when compared to the same month a year ago.
“Due to February having fewer days, we expected and observed minor decreases in Opera Mini users, page views, and data transferred compared to January,” the company stated.
Data consumption decreased 1.7 percent compared to January, though it grew 139 percent when compared to February last year.
The company also notes that data send to users handsets through Opera Mini is compressed 90 percent. Users generated only 790 million MB of data for carriers, but the amount might have been 7.3 petabytes if uncompressed.
During the last month, Opera's report was focused on the Middle East. Some of the findings include:
- Google, Facebook, and YouTube are the top 3 sites in each of the top countries of the Middle East. Yahoo!, the BBC, and Wikipedia are also popular in the region. - From February 2010 to February 2011, page views in the top 10 countries of the Middle East increased by 233%, unique users increased by 142% and data transferred increased by 259%. - The top 10 countries using the Opera Mini browser in the Middle East are Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Qatar, Syria, Oman and Israel.
The company also noted that the page views increased dramatically in Egypt during the recent events there, since users took to their mobile phones as means to stay in touch with the outer world. Facebook, Twitter and other social-networking tools were the most accessed in the time frame.
Earlier this week, Opera launched a new flavor of the browser, Opera Mini 6.