Opera Mini grows in Africa

The number of mobile phone users that use the Opera Mini browser has topped 200 million per month for the first time, that's up 47% from last year, the Norwegian company has revealed, according to The Next Web.

Releasing its latest State of the Mobile Web report that looks at usage of its products across 53 countries, Opera revealed that it passed the landmark in June 2012.

The report itself has plenty of focus on Opera's growth in Africa, where it has noticed a number of telling signs that illustrate that mobile Web usage is growing in sophistication, as much as usage.

Facebook tops the charts in all African countries where Opera has a presence, with the exception of Algeria, Angola, and Guinea, where Google stands at the top of the charts, Cnet reports.

While Africa continues to develop, slower mobile networks still make loading pages a tedious process. Opera changes this by using data compression technology, similar to how BlackBerry devices work when browsing and sending and receiving e-mail.

Opera Mini is famed for its data compression, which squeezes data by as much as 90% - highly useful function in areas of the world, such as Africa, that have limited mobile connectivity over vast spaces. In June, Opera Mini users generated over 2.01 billion megabytes of data, but would have stood at 20 petabytes if the data were uncompressed.

Tech Crunch writes that among the individual country highlights: Opera notes that Libya, post revolution, has grown the most of any country in the region in terms of users, page views and data consumption, respectively 323.267% for users; 1.886.839% for page views and 1.498.984% for data usage.

Another politically troubled country, C^ote d'Ivoire, also showed strong growth. Opera Mini users there were up by 600%, with page views up 744% and data use up 760%. This is in a country with a population of 16 million, where mobile penetration is at 15 million, and land line penetration at a tiny 230 000. That underscores just how important mobile is there.