In its final State of the Mobile Web report in 2008, Opera reviews the top sites and top phones for Opera Mini in both Europe and North America. Russia and Ukraine lead Europe, followed closely by the United Kingdom. The full report is available from www.opera.com/smw/. Released by AT&T in early November, the BlackBerry Bold made an immediate impact and is high on the list of top handsets preferred by Opera Mini users in the US. Facebook and MySpace are locked in a battle for mobile social networking supremacy in the United States. For the first time this year, Facebook has surpassed MySpace on the top 10 list in the U.S.

Facebook is also successful in Europe, where other social networks such as Nasza Klasa in Poland and vKontakte in Russia and Ukraine, are consistently the top sites in their respective countries. Opera Mini users viewed more than 5.7 billion pages in November. Since October, page views have gone up 12.1%. Since November 2007, this number is up 303%. Data transfers also increased in line with page views. In November, Opera Mini users generated more than 82.9 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Since October, the data consumed went up by 12.5%. Data in Opera Mini is compressed 90% on average. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 829 million MB of data in November. Since November 2007, data traffic is up 463%

“The numbers are clear: the mobile Web is growing around the world, even in countries where broadband penetration is high. In fact, it is growing because consumers are used to having ubiquitous access to the Web and expect to have it wherever they are,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. “But the real promise of the mobile Web is in connecting those who do not have broadband readily available. The next billion people will use the Web first on their mobile phones. Once that happens we will finally both unleash the vast potential and realize the greatest benefit of the mobile Web.”

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