DJYSRV

Opera announced this week a deal with Bytemobile to offer that firms technologies to speed up the operations of the browser on mobile devices. Bytemobile, based in Mountain View, Calif., markets a technology known as Optimization Services Node (OSN) that carriers use to speed mobile Internet performance.

Bytemobile claims that OSN has been deployed by 60 operators worldwide, including Willcom, serving a total of nearly 1 billion subscribers.

In a separate announcement Opera released Mobile 8.5 Web browser for Windows Mobile Pocket PC (PPC). Opera 8.5 beta runs on Windows Mobile 2003 and 5.0, offering Opera's fast Web surfing on the full range of Windows Mobile Pocket PC devices. Users should remind themselves this is a BETA product and expect the unexpected in terms of performance.

Opera is expected to launch its Opera Mini mobile browser, which is based on Opera Mobile but designed for even simpler handsets, sometime before the end of January. In June, the company launched Opera for Windows Mobile 2003.

The bulk of Opera's revenues come from non-desktop devices including mobile devices, set top boxes and portable media players, although Opera's desktop business continues to be important because it tends to drive innovation on the browser. Earlier this year Opera inked a deal with Google to share search revenues from Opera browser users. Updates to the deal with Google are specically targeted at mobile device applications. Opera was able to drop licensing fees for its desktop browser and passed the 100 million mark in downloads as a result due to the revenues expected to be coming in from search deals.