14 DAY TRIAL // Today, Norwegian company Opera Software announced officially that it enjoys a number of more than 100 million mobile users on the two browsers it made available for handsets, namely Opera Mini and Opera Mobile.
According to the company, its Opera Mini application is enjoying a number of over 90.4 million users every month, while the Opera Mobile browser is being used by more than 15 million people.
105 million people use Opera on their phones, the company concludes, citing data published in Opera’s State of the Mobile Web report.
"Experts all have some date when they claim the mobile Web will overtake the PC web — we’re watching that transition now,” said Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder of Opera Software.
“But, rather than think of numbers, we think of people. 100 million is the beginning of a new era for the Web. In the next few years, hundreds of millions of people will take their first baby steps online. They will make their voices heard across their country and around the world".
“They will not only discover new ideas, but contribute their own. We defend those voices and celebrate those ideas. It is why we believe access to the Web is a universal right, and no device is more universal than a mobile phone.”
The number of monthly users for Opera's applications is already impressive, but the company aims at adding some more of them to the list, and plans on launching new versions of the mobile browsers in the near future.
The Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, held next week, is the place where new flavors of Opera Mini browser on devices running Android, iOS, J2ME, BlackBerry, and Symbian will be released, along with an iPad-tailored iteration.
Moreover, new versions of the Opera Mobile browser will also debut at the event, aimed at handsets running under Google's Android platform, and at Nokia's Symbian OS.
“Our developers have been hard at work building the mobile browser of the future — for both consumers and mobile operators. We want our browser to impact lives in a meaningful way. It’s one reason we use mostly renewable resources to power Opera Mini’s servers,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software.
“It’s why we make it light, so you don’t have to recharge your battery every few hours. It’s why Opera Mini and Opera Mobile can help operators reduce the bandwidth that clogs their networks. A browser may never change the world, but we’ll never stop trying to.”