The Opera Mini fan boy I am due to its superior web browsing experience compared to pretty much anything else, I had to go over to Opera's stand and pay them a visit. No, they didn't show OperaMini running on the iPhone so I guess Steve did not show up at the airport. Anyway, what they had at their stand was a very impressive real-time display of where and how much Opera Mini is used around the world. Since Opera Mini uses network side compression servers, page hits are easy to count. The picture on the left shows what's going on in Europe when I visited the booth at around 5 pm yesterday. Lots of hits per second in the UK, Germany and eastern European countries, much less in Spain and France though. I wonder why that is so? No agreements with network operators there to pre-install Opera Mini? Here are some stats from a couple of semi randomly selected countries:
- UK: 90 hits/s
- Germany: 37 hits/s
- Russia: 3000 hits/s (according to Opera, one of their biggest Mini markets!)
- Egypt: 48 hits/s
- South Africa: 422 hits/s
- Nigeria: 150 hits/s
When I look at these stats it looks like in western European countries, even those with a strong Opera Mini use compared to Spain and France, network operators and users totally underestimate the power of server side compression when it comes to mobile web surfing speed and the bill at the end of the month.