14 DAY TRIAL // Opera Software has just announced reaching a new milestone with its Opera Mini mobile browser, which had over 71.2 million users in September this year. Moreover, the company announced that the application served over 36.9 billion pages in September 2010, and that it 535.3 million MB of data for operators worldwide during the time frame.
In September 2010, the number of Opera Mini users went up by 7.1 percent when compared to August 2010, while the number of unique users grew 100.1 percent when compared to the same period the previous year.
According to the Norwegian software giant, in September 2010, Opera Mini users viewed 36.9 billion pages, up 9.0 percent from August, and up 147.2 percent when compared to September 2009.
535.3 million MB of data were generated in September by Opera Mini's users, marking an increase of 9.4 percent from the previous month, and up 135.8 percent year on year.
The company also notes that this amount of data would actually translate in over 4.9 petabytes of data, which would have been delivered on the carriers' networks, if it weren't for the browser's compressing solution.
Data in Opera Mini is compressed by up to 90 percent, the company notes.
“Keeping costs low is about more than just saving money; it is about making the Web more accessible to a wider range of people,” said Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder, Opera.
“That is why we focus so heavily on making Opera Mini work on all phones, and, in fact, why we originally founded Opera. We believe access to the Web is a universal right, and we hope that by keeping costs low, we play a part in helping people connect, on any device, wherever they are.”
At the same time, the company announced that Opera Mini enables users save more than 2.2 billion USD each month courtesy of its compressing technology.
Those to benefit the most from Opera Mini's capabilities are users in the United States and Nigeria. Users in the US could save up to 141 USD on average each month, while users in Nigeria save 44 USD each month.
“Since mobile data is compressed by up to 90%, Opera Mini users potentially save a lot of money on pay-as-you-go plans,” the company notes.
“Based on the average cost of browsing the Web on a mobile phone (on a per-MB basis), users in the top 10 countries save over 802 million USD per month, or over 9.6 billion USD per year. Users worldwide save more than 2.2 billion USD per month, or over 27.4 billion USD per year.”
Additional info on Opera’s State of the Mobile Web Report can be found on the company's website.