Opera has published its latest State of the Mobile Web report for March, including the usual stats and usage breakdowns of its every-popular Opera Mini mobile Web browser.
I’m always interested in two particular data points from these reports; the growth of Opera usage in general, and the data consumed (or crunched) through the Opera Mini browser. For this month, Opera Mini had over 55.2 million users, a 9.3% increase from February 2010 and up 140% compared to March 2009. Those users also generated over 396 million MB of compressed data for operators worldwide, up 19.8% since February.
If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 3.6 petabytes of data in March. Overall, data traffic is up 166% since March of 2009. This compression technology is what put Opera on the map as one of the leading mobile Web browsers- and with the introduction of Opera Mini for the iPhone, it’s usage is still skyrocketing month-over-month.
Speaking of the iPhone, Opera’s Mini browser has only been available for a couple weeks and has already become the 3rd most popular device on Opera’s network. For the first time, the iPhone has overtaken the Blackberry as the number one device accessing Opera Mini in the USA. On the strength of its iPhone usage, the U.S. has jumped from the 8th most active country using Opera Mini to 5th.
Much more data concerning the iPhone will be included in Opera’s forthcoming report next month, so it should be interesting to see what kind of effect it’s already having. As always, much more info can be found in Opera’s full report, which is available here.
