Mobile Web traffic increasing rapidly for non-smartphones

November 25th, 2009

Apple’s iPhone changed the way we think about mobile Web access by giving us the “real” Internet via its Mobile Safari browser. Since its introduction, smartphone vendors have scrambled to offer a comparable browsing experience, generally by building a browser based on WebKit—the same engine that powers Mobile Safari. But consumer expectation is driving demand for mobile Internet access for standard cell phones as well. According to data from mobile browser maker Opera, mobile traffic to standard smartphones surged in October, growing 16 percent over September.

Opera Software’s Opera Mini browser is one of the few usable solutions for standard “feature phones.” The Java-based browser actually uses proxy servers to compress and handle much of the rendering of websites using the same rendering engine as Opera’s desktop browser, which is then pushed to the phone and displayed on-screen. This arrangement makes it possible to view even complex pages on meager hardware (by smartphone standards) and helps avoid some of the network congestion and speed issues that can sometimes affect full-featured mobile browsers.