State of the Mobile Web - July 2010

Every Month Opera releases the State of the Mobile Web report based on the surfing habits of Opera Mini users worldwide.

In July 2010 Opera Mini had over 62.3 million users who viewed 29.6 billion pages and generated over 445 million MB of data traffic for Operators worldwide. Thats after the data was compressed by upto 90% else Opera Mini users would have viewed over 4.1 petabytes of data in July.

Also this report focuses on the Southeast Asian Region providing information about the top websites and handsets used in Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Brunei, Singapore, Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar besides the Top 10 countries using Opera Mini worldwide.

An interesting thing to note is that Google and Facebook compete for the top spot in several Southeast Asian countries. In Thailand and Laos, Google is #1, followed by hi5 and then Facebook. In Vietnam, where My Opera is very popular, Facebook is not in the top 10 list at all.

Last month Opera also conducted a survey of Opera Mini users to find out more about the users.
Some of the findings are as under

* They estimate that the global ratio of male to female mobile Web users to be 77% (male) to 23% (female). Although it has to be noted that the number of female users is increasing at a faster rate.

* Across the board, 18-27 is still the biggest age group of Opera Mini users.

* In the survey users were also asked “Do you have online friends you’ve never met in real life?” And in general yes responses to this question were high which indicates that mobile Internet users tend toward having online friends they have not met in person.

You can check the details and read the full report here.

Messaging Packs Or pay per use?

Do you use send a lot of messages on your mobile?

Then its best that you contact your mobile service provides and activate an add on to get free messages. Trust me, even if you don't finish the messages in the pack, as long as you choose the pack wisely it should save you money.

Let of explain with the example of my service provider Aircel.

They have message packs for 9 and 38 rupees which give you 99 and 450 messages respectively.
The normal charges for sending a message is 1 rupee. So in this case even if you send messages equal to the value of the add on you are better of getting an add on than paying for each message.

So go ahead and call your mobile service provider and find ways to cut your messaging costs.