Opera Mini Out for Treo, BlackBerry

Opera said Wednesday that it had released a version of the Opera Mini browser compatible with Treo and BlackBerry phones. The company is responding to a growing segment of the wireless industry - analyst firm Gartner estimates 42.1 PDA phones shipped worldwide in the first half of 2006.

Since its launch in February of this year, the mobile version of the Opera browser counts some seven million users and over one billion pageviews. T-Mobile's European subsidiaries have already begun to include Opera Mini on select handsets.

The company says that its browser offers faster and better page rendering, while taking into consideration memory and data usage, a concern for many mobile data users. A server-side component compresses web pages, thus shrinking the amount of data used.

"Opera Mini is a no-frills, instant gateway to the World Wide Web on today's basic line of mobile phones," Opera Chief Commercial Officer Rolf Assev. "But we see folks in the industry who are thrilled to use it on higher-end devices."

Since it includes a server side component, Opera Mini also gives the company a chance to peer into what its users are visiting. Assev said that Mini's users usage patterns mimic that of desktop web use. The most popular sites include Google, followed by Gmail.com, Friendster, MySpace, Yahoo, and hi5.com, also popular desktop Web sites.

"They use Mini to find information or network, even bid on eBay while on-the-go," he said.

Opera Mini for Treo and BlackBerry is available as a free download directly from the handset at mini.opera.com. Verizon Wireless customers are not currently supported, the company said.