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    Categories: mobile

Opera Partners with 7 Indian Smartphones Vendors To Increase Mobile Browser Market Share

Few people know Opera in the desktop space but it’s opposite when it comes to Opera on mobile. Most of the mobile users know it, and have also used it.

While it comes to the web, Opera is the fourth most popular browser (after Chrome, Firefox, IE/Safari depending on you OS), in the mobile world however, Opera seems to have been always there.

It was there in the pre-smartphone days, known for its data crunching that enabled user to get faster web page rendering. Because Opera used server-side, data reduction, users also had to download less data thus saving bandwidth.

In the smartphones as well, Opera had gained momentum as people downloaded it as their browser of choice because of their fondness that they had from the usage in feature phones. However, the Android browser (and later Chrome on mobile) was quite capable and thus Opera found itself fighting stiff battles. Then came along the plethora of browsers and suddenly mobile internet had the same competition as the desktop.

In fact, once India’s most used mobile browser, Opera was recently toppled by UC Browser which claims to be the number one 3rd party browser used by Indians with 30% market share. If you look at Statcounter analytics, in the month of June/July of this year, UC Browser overtook Opera as the Top mobile browse in India.

To tackle this, Opera has partnered with seven Indian smartphone vendors (Micromax, Videocon, Spice, MoMagic Technologies, Wynncom, Lemon Mobiles and iBall).

According to the partnership agreement, Opera will be pre-loaded in the phones that will be launched by these companies. This is not the first tie-up of Opera and now it has such a partnership with 17 companies including Karbonn, Lava, Intex, HCL etc.

This is indeed a huge number and as we know that Micromax is one of the biggest Indian vendors out there, Opera should be able to get a good reach because of this. Some of the phones that will be launching with Opera Mini in the near future are Micromax’s Canvas 4, Canvas Doodle 2, Spice’s Coolpad, Lava Iris 506Q, Celkon Campus A20, Karbonn A9 Star. Many other phones will also be launched in the future with opera Mini installed in them.

Besides these, Opera has also tied up with Symphony Mobile in Bangladesh and Colors Mobile in Nepal to bring Opera Mini to these countries as well.

According to Sunil Kamath, Opera Software Vice President for South Asia- “India is home to the largest number of Opera Mini users in the world. Partnering with local OEMs in India and neighboring countries is part of our growth strategy to take Opera Mini’s user numbers in the region from strength to strength.”

Let’s see if Opera is able to regain its lost ground with these partnerships.

Kunal Prakash: A graduate from IIT-Roorkee, Kunal Prakash’s love for technology was at first sight and everlasting. He is currently enjoying the first stint as a professional after leaving over 20 years of schooling. You can follow him on facebook or visit his blog for his other musings.
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