Opera today released its new baby, Opera Mini, worldwide. Today’s global launch follows the trials of Opera Mini in the Nordics and in Germany during the fall of 2005, which resulted in a user base of over one million people.

Opera Mini is a new kind of web browser for virtually all mobile phones and devices. Opera Mini was designed to enable the web on mobile phones that would normally be incapable of running a Web browser. Instead of requiring the phone to process Web pages, Opera Mini uses a remote server to pre-process the page before sending it to the phone, which makes it perfect for phones with very low resources, or low bandwidth connections.

In the first few months of its trial launch, Opera Mini was downloaded and used on more than 450,000 unique mobile phones. Approximately 1,000,000 pages were being downloaded per day through Opera’s servers.

Pages are reformatted and compressed by Opera’s servers before being sent to the phone, so they only use about one fifth of their normal amount of traffic. Opera Mini will store the cache, history, cookies, and passwords for pages you visit on the your service provider’s server, which may raise some privacy concerns.

Opera Mini’s start page features a Google search box, as a result of its agreement with Google earlier this month, where Google will be the default search partner for the mobile browsers: Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. Under the one-year deal Opera will make Google Search a major part of the browser’s home screen.

Opera Mini runs on all phones that support Java, which most already do. It is estimated that there are more than 700 million Java enabled mobile phones in the market.

Installing Opera Mini is as simple as downloading a ringtone or a game. You simply send an SMS or direct your phone’s WAP browser to http://mini.opera.com.

Opera faces a challenge with the launch of Opera Mini, the major reason being that mobile web access is still a novelty, and people don’t know how it is possible to surf the full Web on their phones.

Opera spokesman Eskil Sivertsen acknowledge the challenges that lie ahead for Opera, telling Opera Watch “in essence, we’re suggesting you do something with your phone that most people have never thought about, let alone thought possible.” “The challenge is to get as many people as possible to try Mini, because we know that when they do they usually love it.”

Opera is not planning on spending millions of dollars on an advertising campaign, which will make its efforts to get Opera Mini into the mass market that much more difficult.

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Download Opera Mini via: SMS (Text message) | mini.opera.com

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