Mobile

State of the_^ Web

(An African view)

Charles McCathieNevile

Chaals

Opera Software

Opera Mobile

The browser, on mobiles

• 1998 for Psion devices
• 2002 Installed on phones
• 2003 "Small Screen Rendering"
• 2005 real Ajax, Platform APIs
• 2008 Scope / Dragonfly debugger

Opera Mini

A browser on any phone

• 2005 trial launch
• 2006 global launch
• 2006
  • Secured connection
  • Content folding
  • RSS reader

Special 120kb client and proxy-based compression

Opera Mini

• 2007
  • Javascript / Ajax
  • 1 billion pages/month!
  • RSS reader
  • Link, Speed Dial
  • Mouse cursor
  • Overview / Intelligent Zoom

Opera Mini

• 2008
  • Mobile Web Report
  • 5 billion pages/month
  • Load and save
  • Zoom Image
  • RTSP - streaming
  • SVG, Android, BREW...

Users in Africa

• World: 20 M
• S. Africa: 3/4 M
• Nigeria: 300k
• Egypt: 200k
• Kenya: 150k
• Libya: 40k
• Tanzania: 20k
• Next 5: ~10k

NB: Very approximately - �10%

Users in history

March 2006

• World: 800 k
• Sudan: 8.5 k
• Nigeria: 4.5 k
• Ghana: 1000
• Zaire: 500
• Mozambique: 56
• Libya: 12

Africa was ~5%, now ~10% of global users

What people want

Mobile Web report

http://opera.com/smw

• Social Networking
• News, Sport, Information
• Messaging, dating

and the whole Web, too

Bandwidth power

Reading BBC News

Opera Mini

117kb

(Opera Turbo

~250kb?)

iPhone

2.5 MB

NB: A single test

Some Conclusions

Opera "Turbo"

Like Mini in the desktop

Africa is sociable too...

... but also news/info-focused

Penetration is still low

But growth rates are still huge

Thank you - Obrigado

[email protected]

• Mobile Report: opera.com/smw
• Turbo: labs.opera.com
• Opera Mini: operamini.com
• Me: my.opera.com/chaals

There are no foolish questions
Only fools who do not question