Norway-based Opera Software has entered into a three-year extension of its global frame agreement with UK-based telecom firm Vodafone.
As per the current deal, Vodafone will offer its customers Opera products such as a Vodafone-branded Opera Mini browser, for feature phones, particularly in emerging markets.
Opera Mini, introduced in 2009, is a web browser designed primarily for mobile phones, smartphones and personal digital assistants.
Opera Mini requests web pages through Opera Software’s servers, which process and compress them before sending them to the mobile phone, speeding up transfer by two to three times and dramatically reducing the amount of data transferred, chargeable on many mobile phone data plans.
The pre-processing increases compatibility with web pages not designed for mobile phones.
The company notes that Opera Mini has seen an increase in the number of active users by 300% year-on- year and growing in both emerging markets and the European Union.
On March 2011, Opera Mini had recorded more than 100 million users and 2 billion daily page views and had more than 113.5 million users in May 2011.
Opera Software expects that the deal will enable it to provide its consumers with a simple approach to their mobile device.
