Opera mini kicking ass: 2MM users, 4MM daily page views
Awesome announcements out of CTIA: Opera mini, the mobile Java version of Opera's browser has been downloaded 2 million times, and they're getting over 4 million page views a day from it. Check out the Press Release here and these numbers from T-Mobile:
Since T-Mobile started offering Opera Mobile to deliver the full Internet on their smartphones in 2005, the mobile browser has proven itself to be a compelling revenue booster. During the first few months after the launch of web'n'walk in June 2005, an average web'n'walk customer was visiting 330 Internet pages per month. This resulted in an increase of 489 percent in data volume per user and 119 percent of data ARPU (excl. SMS) per user.
Nice! That's mostly direct to consumer distribution too, I'm pretty sure - that has to be a real watershed in mobile application distribution. Opera also announced a deal with Buzznet and Tribe to distribute the browser on their websites (with some default links, I'm sure), enabling those communities to go mobile with minimal effort.
Very cool!
-Russ