Digital Trends

Although it's been quietly available for months (longer in Europe), Opera Mini officially launches today, bringing Web browsing to Java-enabled phones.

Opera Software officially took the wraps off Opera Mini today, a free Web-browsing service compatible with Java-enabled phones, even comparatively low-end phones which normally have trouble accessing the Web in a meaningful way.

Opera originally announced Opera Mini back in August 2005,, and has quietly been letting users in Europe (and, more recently, worldwide) use the service, with the proviso that it was still in development and could go wonky at any time. Still, Opera Mini has already managed to rack up more than 1 million users, and now it's officially available as a—free!—full-fledged service offering from Opera Software

Instead of being a full-blown Web browsing application resident on the cell phone, Opera Mini is a lightweight Java client which interacts with Opera-hosted servers. When a user requests a Web page via Opera Mini, the request goes through Opera's server farm which fetches the page, processes it for display on Opera Mini (taking into account screen size, memory, and processing limits on many mobile phones) and sends the result back to the mobile. Opera says it's spend a lot of time optimizing its code for use on mobiles (no doubt as part of the more fully-featured Opera Mobile product so that the back-end processing required by its servers isn't overwhelming: even so, Opera has ramped up its server farm with more than 100 Linux boxes to handle the load.

Users can get Opera Mini either by downloading it to their phones from Opera's Web site using a WAP browser, by downloading it to their computer and then transferring it to their phone, or (in some countries) by having the program sent to their phone via an SMS message. Opera Mini is free, although users are responsible for data service charges from their mobile network providers. Opera also plans to license Opera Mini to handheld phone makers and service operators, permitting them to re-brand the browser as their own.