Opera Mini for Mobile quietly launched worldwide
Mobile phone users of Java-capable cell phones anywhere in the world may find browsing the web easier and cheaper now that Opera Software is allowing anyone to download its Opera Mini application for free. The officical worldwide launch of Opera Mini is planned for sometime this month, but Opera has quietly removed the restrictions on its website that would previously only allow certain countries to download the mobile phone application.
While investigating initial reports, mobilemodo has confirmed that with a Java compatible cell phone you can download Opera Mini for free from http://mini.opera.com. We decided to test it out with an older Toshiba VM4050 cell phone (incidentally it is not even on their current compatibility list) on Sprint's data network. We were pleasantly surprised about how effortless it was to download and install Opera Mini which is just under 100k in size. We initially tested the browsing features by viewing websites that were not Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) enabled, including mobilemodo.com. The intial results received for viewing webpages was quite impressive.
The Opera Mini allows users to access the Web on mobile cell phones that would not normally be capable of running an Internet Web browser, including most of today's modern WAP enabled phones. Opera Mini does this by first connecting to Opera's web servers, which then strip down the size of the web page making the transfer back over the cell phone data network much quicker in order to be viewed on the small screen of the phone.
It has been reported that Opera enabled the quiet download of Mini in order to prepare for the increased load that its servers will have to handle after the official announcement is released. With our initial tests, we are confident that this will be a very popular with the over 700 million mobile cell phone users worldwide that will be able to use this application, once the official launch is announced.