14 DAY TRIAL // On Wednesday, Norwegian company Opera Software announced that its Opera Mini 5 was set to be used to power a next-generation browser from NII Holdings, Inc., a leading provider of mobile services operating under the Nextel brand in Latin America. According to the company, the Opera Mini 5 application will come to the Latin American market pre-loaded on a series of handsets launched on Nextel's airwaves, starting with the Motorola i1, the Android-based touchscreen handset that should soon become available in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico.
The new software solution will come with all the popular features Opera Mini packs inside, including Speed Dial, zoom and tabbed browsing. Through Speed Dial, users should be able to quickly access key content, the tabbed browsing features enables them to open more than one web page at a time in different tabs, while being able to navigate between open pages, and zoom offers them the possibility to hone in on the displayed content.
“Latin America is an important market for Opera, and we look forward to bringing Nextel customers throughout the region the best and most complete web-browsing experience available on a mobile phone,” Lars Boilsen, CEO, Opera, commented on the announcement. Opera Mini is currently used by more than 55 million people around the world, Opera notes, adding that the solution offers great data-consumption savings, as it compresses pages by up to 90 percent.
The browser should enable the access to more than one page at a time, which eliminates the need of leaving a page to access another, while also providing better performance and less memory and operating system requirements. Additionally, the solution will initiate in Spanish or Portuguese on Nextel’s main content portals, which have been customized for each country they are available in. NII Holdings becomes this way the first Latin American carrier to deliver a fully customized web experience based on Opera Mini 5.
“We are committed to delivering the highest quality voice and data services to our valuable customers throughout Latin America, and, by partnering with Opera, we will be able to deliver on that promise by providing an enhanced user experience,” Greg Santoro, chief marketing and strategy officer from NII Holdings, said. “We are excited to work with Opera to bring our customers a customized user-friendly web-browsing experience on the Nextel network along with new and exciting content.”