February 17, 2009 by Eddy Philipe
One of the more interesting nuggets thrown up by this week’s Mobile World Conference in Barcelona is the announcement that Vodafone and search engine minnow, Opera, are to team up to create a mobile browser aimed at lower end mobile handsets. It’s essentially a new version of the Opera Mini mobile browser that will offer fully functional browsing, even on phones with systems as low-end as Java. The pages will be compressed by up to 90 percent making them to be viewable on even very budget phones and allowing fast browsing even in areas with slow network speeds.
The browser was recently trialled in Egypt where it prooved a roaring success, with 400,000 customers downloading it within the space of a month. It is now set to be rolled out to Asia, Africa, Europe and the Middle East where it will be available for download as well as embedded into existing handsets.
According to Opera CEO, Jon Von Tetzchner, the browser, “Empowers more people around the world to benefit from a fast and user-friendly mobile internet experience.”
The alliance could prove to be very profitable for the pair. In an industry racing to be top of the high-end side of things, SmartPhones, etc., they may have found an unguarded hole in the market.
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