While I had some criticism for Opera's choice to push a feature-phone browser on a smartphone audience, I have to applaud the Norwegian team's focus on increasing the speed of all mobile browsing. In the quest to attain the same Internet for every device, programmers have reached another milestone. Their latest product, Opera Turbo, is a server-side technology that compresses network traffic by up to 80%.
For you and me, this means rapid, *real* browsing and lower costs for pay-per-kilobyte plans. To OEMs, enterprise deployments, and data carriers, this is an answer to the question of future demand and compatibility. Opera isn't just thinking in terms of maximizing the potential of your hardware; they're looking at the big picture of bandwidth availability - both for service providers and enterprise customers.
As mobile internet use increases, and more and more people are buying-web browsing phones, how can carriers (or a business' data plan) satisfy the growing need for bandwidth without continually increasing the end-user price to what could eventually become prohibitively expensive rates? Opera's solution is extreme compression.
Of course, compression isn't possible without data loss, so the key is choosing which bits can be discarded, and what can be reconstructed. Opera Turbo boasts the highest-quality compression technology, reducing traffic by up to 71% on laptops and 80% on handsets. It also works with Ajax and Flash - promising the best browsing experience for such a small resource footprint.
Opera Turbo works with the company's desktop and mobile browsers. It will be unveiled at Mobile World Congress this week.
