Massive mobile browsing upswing

INTERNET

Mobile browsing firm Opera reports that mobile web browsing saw growth of over 2000% in some African countries during the last quarter of 2010.

In a quarterly report, Opera said Sudan and Zimbabwe led the top 10 countries of the region in terms of page-view growth (4908.2 % and 2321.6 %, respectively).

Zimbabwe and Sudan led the top 10 countries of the region in growth of unique users (1719.3 % and 1219.4 %, respectively). Sudan and Zimbabwe led the top 10 countries of the region in growth of data transferred (3672.6 % and 1449.5 %, respectively).

And Zimbabwe led the top 10 countries of the region in page views per user, with each user browsing 830 pages on average each month.

The top 10 countries using Opera Mini in Africa were South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Ghana, Sudan, Libya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Namibia.  Their total page views grew by 365%, number of unique users grew by 176% and volume of data transferred increased by 331%.

In the top 10 African countries, Facebook and Google vie for the number one website visited. Other popular sites among Africa’ s mobile web users are  YouTube, Yahoo, and Wikipedia.

Opera also looked at the top 10 handsets used in each of the top 10 African countries. Its report states: “ Out of the 100 total handsets listed, 87 of them were Nokia, 8 of them were Samsung, 3 of them were Sony Ericsson and 2 of them were LG. In 6 out of the 10 countries, the top 10 lists were comprised solely of Nokia handsets.”