Opera Software (News - Alert) has announced the commercial release of Opera Mobile 9.5, its Web browser for phones.

 

According to market research firm In-Stat (News - Alert), the smartphone market will grow at more than a 30 percent compound annual growth rate for the next five years globally, exceeding unit sales for laptops. Users are downloading more applications and generating higher usage as measured by average revenue per user for operators. The main driver that has fueled this growth is overall user experience on the mobile Web, Opera officials say.

 

Built on Opera's core architecture, the Opera Mobile 9.5 desktop-like browsing experience has features such as zooming and panning to make it easier to navigate and load pages. 

 

Opera Mobile is currently shipped on more than 100 million phones with such mobile OEMs and operators as HTC, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and T-Mobile (News - Alert).

 

In late 2007 Opera Software announced that Opera Mini 4 was downloaded more than one million times in the 10 days following its worldwide debut on November 7. Opera Mini is free from http://www.operamini.com/.

 

Overall, Opera Mini has "already been embraced by more than 26 million cumulative users who view more than one billion Web pages every month," company officials said.

 

Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera, said the reception for Opera Mini 4 is proof that "consumers want the freedom to choose the same experience, the same Web, regardless of what device they use."

 

According to Gartner (News - Alert), more than half of cellular subscribers in the U.S. and Western Europe will access the Web on a mobile device at least once a week by 2010. Opera officials see that as Opera Mini's market, since the product automatically reduces the size of the transferred pages, so Web sites load faster while reducing the cost of surfing.