Opera Mini proves it can beat Safari for some users, but its biggest fans are all around the world
Opera
revealed on Friday that there were over 2.6 million unique users of Opera Mini on the iPhone in April, making it the third most popular device in the world for Opera's mobile browser. The only two phones more often used with Opera Mini are Nokia phones; in fact, the only other phones on the top ten list are Nokia phones.
The most unique users, pages viewed, and data transferred for Opera Mini on the iPhone came from from the United States, Japan, and Germany, and always in that order. Opera Mini has also became a popular browser for the iPhone in France, Canada, Netherlands, Italy and South Korea.
Despite the apparent success of its browser on the iPhone, Opera is unambiguous about its dependence on much more of the mobile world:
"As much of a milestone as it is, the iPhone is only one out of more than 800 handsets supported by Opera Mini," writes Jon von Tetzchner, co-founder, Opera Software. "Although we laud these individual phones for the amazing things they can do, we must remember that one handset is but a drop of rain in the ocean that is the mobile phone industry."
In mid-April, when Opera boasted that it was the browser of choice for
over 100 million users, the iPhone version had only just been submitted to the App Store for approval. Then it was only too obvious that, besides the 50 million who enjoyed Opera on their desktop clients (Linux, Mac, or Windows), mobile Opera users enjoyed the alternative browser via a variety of devices: the Nintendo DS, Windows Mobile and Google Android devices, and, as von Tetzchner points out, almost a thousand other mobile phones.
Overall, Opera Mini saw 58.9 million users in April, a 6.6% increase from March and a more than 152% increase compared to April of 2009.