Opera mini has been around for about 2.5 years, passing the mark of 40 million users, a billion Web pages downloaded per month and 32 languages. The mini browser goal is to bring the full Web to virtually any phone except the BREW ones. However Opera said its working on a BREW implementation as well as a Google Android one. Because Opera mini is written in Java, the iPhone version will have to wait until Apple decides to let Sun develop a Java version for its phone.

The Opera mini 4.1 brings new features like URL auto-complete, download/upload files and the ability to save web pages to the phone. Opera mini is a tiny 97KB java file that you download onto your phone, relying on Opera's servers in Norway to do the actual browsing.

"By doing that, we reformat the page, compress it heavily by 80% and then send it to your phone. It decreases your data rate and also makes it much faster... Skyfire has done a good beta implementation and we're impressed but they are going to run in some scalability issue... The thing with Skyfire is that it works well, with a 100 people using the service at one time but it became very server intensive if you have 40 millions using it", says Opera Software's Marketing Director, Benjamin Jacobsen.

Skyfire still more complete than Opera mini, uses same architecture

However, unlike Skyfire which adopted the same thin client-fat server architecture than Opera, the mini browser still does not support Flash.

"We are working on a video implementation with Opera mini but haven't figured out the way to really optimize it" admits Jacobsen.