Edunology - Saumya Aggarwal

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Opera has announced  a full-fledged Opera Mobile browser for smartphones running the Google Android OS. Opera Mobile for Android, which is slated to arrived within a month, will feature hardware acceleration and pinch-to-zoom functionality.

So far the company offered only Opera Mini for Android, a scaled-down version of its browser, designed for less capable phones. Instead of translating and compressing pages through a server before reaching the user, Opera says Opera Mobile for Android will be a full-fledged browser, on the par with Android's built-in browser or Safari on iOS.

Opera claims hardware acceleration will give a major speed boost to Opera Mobile for Android, alongside some user interface improvements. One feature leveraged by hardware acceleration will be pinch-to-zoom, so that you can adjust the zoom level to your liking, instead of relying on the two preset levels of zoom on Opera Mini.

Some website layouts do not display correctly with Opera Mini.

It's unknown how fast Opera Mobile for Android will be in comparison to Opera Mini. The latter compresses website data by up to 90 percent before pushing content to your smartphone, so you get fast loading times even on slow network connections. This has a disadvantage, as fonts and some website layouts do not display correctly on your phone - which is what Opera Mobile plans to address.

Opera Mobile for Android won't be the only third-party browser on the platform. Mozilla previewed earlier this year the Android version of Firefox called Fennec, which is still in its early stages. If you're not happy with the built-in browser on your Android phone, you can wait for Opera Mobile or Fennec, or you can take the Dolphin Browser, a cool browser with pinch-to-zoom and gesture commands, for a spin.

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Opera has released its State of the Mobile Web, August 2010 report, which shows India has 3rd most Opera Mini users in the world. Since the month of August 2009, pages-per-view of opera mobile users in India has grown by 397 percent, while unique-users have grown by 339 percent. The State of the Mobile Web, August 2010 report also states that the page-views per user in India has grown to 405 and the average data transferred per user is 7MB.

"Growth of the mobile Web worldwide accelerated dramatically in August. These numbers are not limited to smartphones alone. The mobile Web was, and remains, a global phenomenon for people all over the world, on a variety of devices and screen sizes," said Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder, Opera Software.
The State of the Mobile Web, August 2010 also reports many global trends. In August 2010, Opera Mini had more than 66.5 million users. As compared to July 2010, it has increased by 6.8 percent, and if you compared it from August 2009, then the number of unique users have increased 108.3 percent. In terms of number of pages viewed, Opera Mini users viewed more than 33.9 billion pages in August 2010, an increase of 14.3 percent since July 2010, and 143.2 percent since August 2009.