Opera has just released it’s “State of the Mobile Web” report for January 2009. The report shows a huge growth in use of Opera Mini globally, and particularly in Ukraine, India and South Africa.
Other figures from the report:
Unique users of Opera Mini continued to grow over January, rising 12.1% over December month to 20 million unique users.
Monthly page views increased by 18% to 7.6 billion Web pages in the same time period.
Data transfers went up 18% from December 2008, generating more than 122 million MB of data for operators worldwide.
The full report is available from http://www.opera.com/smw/
From the release:
“Looking back on a full year of mobile Web growth, it is easy to see why mobile devices will become the primary device for Web usage in most of the world,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. “Developing countries may lead the way due to the sheer prevalence of mobile devices versus PCs, but the solid growth rates in developed countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany, show that the entire world is moving in this direction. These numbers underscore how critical it is that all Web-enabled devices come equipped with a quality Web browser.”
What we think?
Even a casual scan through the figures in the report make one thing immediately obvious. The most impressive growth in mobile Internet usage through Opera Mini has been in developing and emerging markets. Mobile Internet use is literally exploding into some countries. Armenia, for example, saw it’s mobile web access increase by 2800% over 2008! I have to think that it’s not necessarily due to any great efforts on Opera‘s part that it’s numbers have increased so drastically. I’d like to see the figures for those areas from other mobile browsers – I reckon you’ll see that anyone operating there will have seen similar growth.
On day in the near future I can see we talking to each other, somewhere other than a desktop while surfing in the mobile web from our devices: ” How could we surf in that big and ugly screens right in the middle of our living rooms?”