After having gained tremendous worldwide popularity, it seems that Opera Mini is now being opted for by a majority of iPhone users. Over 2.6 million people are reported to have used Opera Mini on their iPhones according since its mid-month launch back in April. Opera’s State of the Mobile Web report highlights global statistics and a full review of Opera Mini on the iPhone as well as mobile browsing trends in the CIS.
April 2010 saw 6.6% increase of Opera Mini users from March 2010 and more than 152% increase than April 2009 with over 58.9 million choosing to use Opera Mini. Those 58.9 million people viewed over 26.3 billion pages in April 2010. The number of pages viewed went up by 1.6% since March this year and 203% since April 2009.
“While many iconic smartphones are superb web-browsing tools, today it is possible to make nearly every phone capable of browsing the Web gracefully,” affirms Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder, Opera Software. “Because the number of mobile-web users will eventually dwarf wireline users, making the Web works flawlessly only on a handful of mobile devices is to turn our collective backs on more than a billion new users. We believe access to the Web is a universal right, and as more companies embrace developing sites for the wide spectrum of mobile-web users, we will come closer to that goal than ever before.”
Across India, there was 302.1% growth in pages viewed since April 2009 and 308.1% hike in unique user growth along with 378 page views per user. The data transferred per user amounted to 7MB and per page view totaled to 20KB. Sites most preferred by Indian users were Google, Orkut, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Zedge, Myopera, and more. The top 10 handsets for April 2010 included Nokia 5130 XpressMusic, Nokia 2700c, Nokia 3110c, Nokia N70, Nokia 6300 and Nokia 7210.
Opera Mini users generated more than 398 million MB of data for operators worldwide in April this year. The data consumption has gone up by 0.6% since March. Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, United States, South Africa, Nigeria, Vietnam and the U.K.were among the top 10 nations for usage of this browser. With the launch of Opera Mini on the iPhone, the U.S. climbed ahead of South Africa and Nigeria.
There were over 2.6 million users of Opera Mini on iPhone in April 2010 and the U.S. now ranks 6th in the list of top 10 countries. When it comes to Opera Mini users on iPhone, the U.S. grabs the number one position, the U.K. stands 4th and Russia holds the 7th position. In terms of the iPhone being used by Opera Mini consumers, the U.S. again tops the list, whereas, the U.K. holds the 5th position.
The top 11 countries from the CIS using Opera Mini are Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan. Between April 2009 and April 2010, page views in these countries increased by 84%, data transfers saw a hike of 97% and unique users increased by 63%.
Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan topped the in terms of page-view growth as well as unique users. Armenia leads the list in page views per user, with each user browsing 1085 pages on average per month. The most preferred sites in the CIS are Vkontakte, Mail.Ru, odnoklassniki.ru, Yandex and Google. The CIS Opera Mini users generally preferred Nokia handsets, followed by Sony Ericsson and Samsung.
Opera Mini growing popularity can be attributed to the fact that it enables data compression by up to 90% for faster browsing and lower data usage.