Norwegian browser company Opera Software has inked a multi-country deal with Vodafone for launching its Opera Mini 5 browser for 2G handsets in five countries - India, South Africa, Turkey, Tanzania and Egypt. Two things to note about the launch: Africa is believed to be primarily a data market, and in India, telecom operators are strongly pushing data access and packages as a differentiator. What works for Opera Mini is that is significantly reduces data consumption costs (they claim to compress data by up to 90 percent), making it ideal for low bandwidth networks, or where data costs are high. Opera already has a deal with Tata Teleservices for Opera Mini in India (some data from that below). Note that Nokia recently acquired browser company Novarra. The Opera Mini browser has been embedded in 20 devices, and supports around 250 GPRS handsets across Vodafone's customer base. According to the release, "A range of Vodafone applications is also in development, most of them designed to deliver the most social benefits to users such as email, finding a job, buying and selling services and products, learning foreign languages, as well as getting access to global applications." There's no indication of which services will specifically be launched in India, and whether the launch will be in collaboration with Opera. Mobile Access Data With Tata Indicom While searching for more information on Opera Mini usage with Tata Indicom, we came across this case study (pdf) published by Opera. The case study is old, covering a period…
