Today Opera Mini launched an upgraded version of the popular mobile browser which enhances social networking on mobile phones.
“We are excited to improve on the mobile Web experience that has already been so well received by both end users and distributors”, says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera Software, in a company press release. “I think the main reason for Mini’s success is that it, for the first time, allows millions of people to use their mobile phones to access the same Web sites they do from their desktop.”
Opera Mini was released in January 2006, and is a free mobile Web browser designed to bring the real Web to mobile phones.
Today Opera Mini reaches over 8 million people who have viewed more than 2 billion websites, as Opera is free can be used on nearly any phone.
Adding to its user-friendly features, Opera Mini is “optimized to reduce the size of data transferred to the phone, which makes browsing fast and cheaper for users that pay per kilobyte transferred”, according to representatives of the company.
Pleasing features to the consumer prompted 9 major service carriers, including T-Mobile, to pre-install Opera Mini in some of their handsets.
The pre-installation of the program is also enables users to access social-networking and personal sites from their mobile device.
While Opera Mini already provided access to all web pages from a mobile phone, content download, data compression, and changeable skins, the upgraded version Opera Mini 3.0 adds several new features.
New features included in the upgraded version are photo sharing, RSS feed reader, secure connections, and content folding which can all be viewed at high speed and low cost.
The new features enable users to access their online community sites directly from their mobile phone, as well as post pictures from their camera phone.
Currently some of the most popular sites visited by Opera Mini 3.0 users are MySpace, Hotmail, GMail, Google, and other social networking sites.
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Autmn Davis is a staff writer for murdok covering ebusiness and technology.
