Opera: Mobile web not just for smartphones

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Opera has urged developers not to ignore consumers without smartphones.

In its State of the Web report, Opera said its 26.5 million people had used the mobile browser to view 10 billion pages in one month for the first time ever, marking an eight per cent increase since May and an increase of 224 per cent from last year.

"More than 10 billion page views in one month underscore that the web is already the platform of choice for mobile devices," said Jon von Tetzchner, chief executive of Opera, in a statement.

"The number may be significant for Opera Mini, but is far more important for the mobile web itself," he said.

He added: "You see, these numbers prove the mobile web is not confined to smartphones alone. In general, feature phones from Nokia and Sony Ericsson dominate our reports."

Opera Mini is most popular in Russia, Indonesia and India, and most used on Nokia and Sony Ericsson phones. In the US, BlackBerrys are the most popular. The most visited site is Google.

He called on developers to create sites which work across platforms - be it mobile phones or even televisions. "For companies planning their mobile web strategy, it is not enough to cater to one phone or one type of phone; rather it is important to code for the web itself and let the browser on the phone handle the rest," he said.

All those Opera Mini page views meant 168.4 million MB of data was sent over operators' networks - no small amount of traffic given Opera Mini compresses data by up to 90 per cent.

Click here for our review of the Opera 10 beta.

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