14 DAY TRIAL // Norwegian software company Opera announced today that one of its products, Opera Mini, which is the most popular mobile browser in the world, has passed over the 50 million unique monthly users mark in January 2010. According to the company, the milestone shows how popular its solution is among mobile phone users, since they chose to download and install Opera Mini over other rival solutions.
At the same time, the company notes that Opera Mini has seen an impressive growth during the past year, and that its user base increased 150 percent from the 20 million monthly unique users it had back in January 2009. The company stresses on the fact that these users haven't just downloaded the Opera Mini browser on their mobile phones, but that they are also using it on an active basis, pushing the solution to the top of the mobile browsing market.
“Opera Mini is the lightweight mobile browser from Opera Software that can be easily downloaded on most handsets. The browser offers server-side compression, which shrinks Web pages by up to 90 percent before loading them on the device, speeding up the browsing experience and also saving users a substantial amount of money on their data usage bills,” the company states.
Opera Mini's exponential growth is also explained when put against a newly published report from Gartner, which states that mobile phones are expected to overtake PCs as the commonly used means for Web connectivity. And with more and more users browsing the web from their handsets, it was only natural that they would look for a software solution that will offer great performance.
Opera Mini has seen impressive growth in usage lately, that's for sure. While the first 10 million users were registered after 28 months, the last 10 million came in only three months, Opera notes. “Our original goal with Opera Mini was to make the Web available to everyone, regardless of their network or mobile phone. Fifty million active monthly users is a great start,” says Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera. “Opera’s innovative nature and its popularity among users will help us make the mobile Web even more accessible and attractive to more people across the world.”
