Be warned upfront that this article is a little self-promoting. Still, I find a need to write it, so bear with me. It has been said that if you do not blow your own trumpet, who will do so for you?

This morning, I woke up to a tweet by BabseAketi, a follower of both my personal and MobilityBlog accounts. Here is what it said:

You can’t write for everyone but if i was in another life, i’d love to write for @mobilityblog … their head dey there!

PS: The broken English phrase, “their head dey there,” loosely translated means “they’ve got it together”. It was a sincere compliment, as I have followed BabseAketi for a while, and know that he tells it the way he feels it.

Now, here is what made his tweet really striking. For months now, we have been inundated with requests from individuals around the world – North America, South America, Africa, and Asia – wanting to guest write for Mobility.

We have also had streams of requests to join our official team. We are also getting streams of requests for sponsored articles (these are articles with links to the sponsor’s website embedded, or articles helping to push a client’s products/services).

Lastly, it has been exciting to be approached by some of the world’s top brands in mobile for our expertise and/or traffic. Some of these brands include: Nokia, Opera, InMobi, Goethe Institut, RIM, Airtel, and most recently Eskimi.

I want to say a big thanks to everyone who has believed in us in one way or the other – and followed it up with action.

In the Beginning
When I started MobilityNigeria in 2008, I had a clear goal – to present useful information to mobile users in my country. However, the quality of content that we put out began to speak for us, and we soon gained an international following.

I’d like to quote from a comment that Dennis Bournique of WapReview made back in May this year:

I think broadening Mobility Nigeria’s focus is good. The web and mobile are global and limiting yourself to one nation is unnecessarily restrictive.

The quality of the writing and content on the site is world class and the site has an international following.

By the way, I’d love to specially thank Dennis for his support for us here. He is a veteran in the mobile space and has consistently recommended us. Please bookmark his site at WapReview.com.

While it may sound like a small feat, developing an international following for a website from a country with a badly maligned image on the global front is anything but easy. Building a global brand from Nigeria is a daunting task. But we are committed to doing it.

When Island Explorer magazine ran a feature on Mobility recently, I made the following statement:

“We have achieved so much in three years that we could be running the number one mobile website in the next five years.”

I meant that. It is a tall order, but I daresay that we are up to it.

Mobility is an example of the can-do Nigerian spirit. When we latch on to something, we excel at it. Hopefully, we can be a shining star of what anyone can achieve if they are committed.

Our Community
In closing, I want to say a big thank you to our regular readers and our vibrant community of commenters. Thanks for being a part of this community. Thanks for your criticisms, your encouraging words, and regular contributions. You guys rock! Let’s make it happen!

Opera Dragonfly, Opera’s developer toolkit, makes its full debut today. Now mature after a six-week beta, the new Opera Dragonfly emerges with a collection of tools to make web design and development faster, smarter and easier.

Three reasons why you should consider Opera Dragonfly in your web development arsenal:

1. Tools for designers

Our Chief Technology Officer created Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), so you know we love designers. Opera Dragonfly has a whole section of utilities to help designers make a more glorious Web. Advanced color-picking tools let you match colors precisely, and, once you have selected those colors, you can store them in a palette for later use. You can examine font and style changes live, and even debug Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG).

2. Going mobile

If you’re serious about developing for the mobile Web, Opera Dragonfly gives you a set of tools to make mobile development easier. If you want to debug your site on a mobile device, just turn on remote debugging. Opera Dragonfly will connect to Opera Mobile and let you debug directly on the device. But why stop there? You can even hack your site on tablets, TVs or your colleagues’ computers with the remote debugging feature. And, Opera Dragonfly can mask as other browsers to help ensure cross-platform mobile compatibility.

3. Always updated

Opera Dragonfly is what we call a hybrid web application. What does that mean? It means you’ll never need to update it, since the latest version is always pulled from the Web. And it will always be compatible with the version of Opera you’re using.

Of course, Opera Dragonfly has everything else you expect in a state-of-the-art toolkit, including:

- DOM inspector: Our own Opera Dragonfly manual says it best, “The DOM Inspector is like View Source on steroids.” Explore the document and edit it live, right before your eyes.

- JavaScript debugger: Just one wrong line and your masterful script is in ruins. So, we make it easy to go through your code with conditional breakpoints, deep property inspection and watches to turn even the most jumbled JavaScript into a thing of beauty.

- Inspect network loads, resources and storage: Opera Dragonfly dives into the guts of your site to show you how items load, how cookies and HTML5 Web Storage operate, and how resources affect site performance and compatibility.

“Developers of the world, unite! You have nothing to save but your time, frustration and probably some hair,” said David Storey, Chief Web Opener and Product Manager for Opera Dragonfly. “Opera Dragonfly is more refined, more beautiful and more awesome than our earlier releases. But don’t take our word for it. Try it yourself and see if it makes your day just a little bit better.”

How do I get Opera Dragonfly?
If you have the Opera browser then just right-click any page and select “Inspect Element”. That’s it. If you don’t have the Opera browser, it’s a free download from http://www.opera.com/.

Resources
* Opera Dragonfly manual: http://www.opera.com/dragonfly/documentation/
* Opera Dragonfly blog: http://my.opera.com/dragonfly/blog/
* Opera Dragonfly video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BeTzJ-HGLo4

About Opera Software ASA
Opera Software ASA has redefined web browsing for PCs, mobile phones and other networked devices. Opera’s cross-platform web-browser technology is renowned for its performance, standards compliance and small size, while giving users a faster, safer and more dynamic online experience. Opera Software is headquartered in Oslo, Norway, with offices around the world. The company is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol OPERA. Learn more about Opera at http://www.opera.com/.

Opera launches the Opera Mobile Store, available in over 200 Countries Oslo, Norway – March 8, 2011 Opera Software, the leading provider of mobile browsers around the world, today announced that the Opera Mobile Store is now open and available at mobilestore.opera.com. This storefront is a featured Speed Dial link in the Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers, which makes the storefront immediately accessible by more than 100 million people who use an Opera browser on their mobile phones.

The Opera Mobile Store has been built and delivered through a strategic partnership with Appia, the leading provider of open application marketplace technology. The Opera Mobile Store offers both free and paid applications for virtually any mobile platform and device. The Opera Mobile Store is available to Opera users and users of other mobile browsers, on all popular mobile phone platforms in more than 200 countries.

The Opera Mobile Store uses Appia’s storefront commerce technology and leverages a wide catalog of applications for phones with Java, Symbian, BlackBerry and Android operating systems. The storefront experience is customized to each user’s phone, providing a tailored catalog based on the phone’s operating system, local language and currency.

“The launch of the Opera Mobile Store supports Opera’s core belief in an open, cross-platform mobile Internet experience by providing Opera users with an integrated storefront of mobile applications,” said Mahi de Silva, EVP, Consumer Mobile, Opera Software. “Our partnership with Appia delivers to all Opera Mobile and Opera Mini users easy access to a wide variety of great content, on any device, all over the world.”

To support the Opera Mobile Store, Opera Software has also launched the Opera Publisher Portal, providing developers with an easy way to get their applications onto the Opera Mobile Store and in front of millions of Opera users every month. In its pre-launch state, the Opera Mobile Store attracted more than 15 million users in February, from 200 countries, achieving more than 700,000 downloads per day. These metrics establish the Opera Mobile Store as a top 10 mobile application store around the world. “The Opera Mobile Store presents a remarkable opportunity for mobile application developers to distribute localized content through a single, far-reaching marketplace,” said Jud Bowman, CEO of Appia. “Appia is thrilled to partner with Opera to deliver an incredible storefront of applications to Opera users and beyond.”

About Appia
Appia is the world’s largest open app marketplace and white label storefront platform, supporting all operating systems and handsets. Today, Appia powers app storefronts for more than 40 partners reaching more than 200 million mobile subscribers in 200 countries and counting. Customers include four of the world’s top five handset manufacturers, three of the top four mobile operators in the US and three of the top ten mobile operators globally including Samsung, Opera, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon Wireless. The Appia Developer Program provides partners with a ready to launch catalog of over 140,000 paid and free apps from more than 30,000 global application developers. Appia is headquartered in Durham, NC with offices in Dallas, TX, and Munich, Germany. For more information, visit www.appia.com, or follow @Appia.

About Opera Software ASA
Opera Software ASA has redefined web browsing for PCs, mobile phones and other networked devices. Opera’s cross-platform web-browser technology is renowned for its performance, standards compliance and small size, while giving users a faster, safer and more dynamic online experience. Opera Software is headquartered in Oslo, Norway, with offices around the world. The company is listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol OPERA. Learn more about Opera at http://www.opera.com/.

Today, opera has announced that “more than 100 million people use an Opera browser each month on their mobile phones. According to the numbers issued today in Opera’s State of the Mobile Web report, 90.4 million people now use Opera Mini every month and approximately 15 million people use Opera Mobile each month. In all, 105 million people use Opera on their phones.”

Those are impressive figures – and well deserved too. Any initiative that promotes accessibility, especially among lower-end devices, is one with huge potentials. The world-famed Opera Mini browser has made it easier and less costlier for millions of mobile subscribers worldwide to access the web on their devices.

A quote from Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software:

“We want our browser to impact lives in a meaningful way. It’s one reason we use mostly renewable resources to power Opera Mini’s servers. It’s why we make it light, so you don’t have to recharge your battery every few hours. It’s why Opera Mini and Opera Mobile can help operators reduce the bandwidth that clogs their networks. A browser may never change the world, but we’ll never stop trying to.”

Opera has also announced that they will be releasing “new versions of the Opera Mini browser on Android, iPhone, J2ME, BlackBerry, Symbian and even the iPad”.

Source

We have been tracking mobile internet trends for Nigeria for years. It is something that I am personally passionate about. Well, today I present some snippets of information from the guys at Opera and Royal Pingdom to help buttress much of what we have observed and stood by here at Mobility Nigeria.

According to the results of a survey conducted by Opera (from the Opera State of the Mobile Web report), 90 percent (%) of Nigerian internet users between the ages of 18-27 said they use their mobile phones more than desktop or laptop computers to access the Internet. Nothing new to us there.

The guys at Royal Pingdom (using statistics from StatCounter) say that over 25% of internet traffic from Nigeria is mobile. That’s not far off from what we estimated here too. For example, our own State of the Mobile Web reports for the last five (5) months show that mobile traffic to this site has hovered between 21% and 30%.

According to Royal Pingdom’s findings, “in every single one [country] where mobile web usage makes up an unusually high share, Nokia’s Symbian OS completely dominates.” We already knew that too. Just check out our State of the Mobile web reports again. Also, smartphones sporting Android, iOS or RIM’s Blackberry are reported to have tiny market shares in these countries. We had that as a fact too.

So far, so good. All indices from international statistics tally roughly with what we have here. 25% is not bad. Actually, it is very significant and is likely to grow more than that over time given the prevailing conditions here.

Now, where are those guys who dismissed it all and asked in disbelief how many Nigerians browse on their handsets? The joke is on them. Hopefully, we can all wake up to the challenges and opportunities of these screaming facts. A lot of people are still conservative about mobile web adoption across the country, but here is the fact – it is catching on faster than many of us think. Whether browsing via Opera Mini on a lowly phone or on a Nokia N8 or an Encipher Tablet, Nigerians are here to stay on the mobile web radar.

I said that years back. I stand by it now. Quote me.

Opera’s state of the mobile web report for the month of February 2010 is out. Nigeria is in the top 10 list again at number 7, one step behind South Africa.

Here is Opera’s snapshot of Nigeria for the month:

* Page-view growth since February 2009: 1,082.5%
* Unique-user growth since February 2009: 638.6%
* Page views per user: 393
* Data transferred per user (MB): 5
* Data transferred per page view (KB): 14
* The Grid, a mobile social-networking site, is new to the list in Nigeria.

Top 10 sites in Nigeria (unique users)

1. facebook.com
2. yahoo.com (3)
3. google.com (2)
4. bbc.co.uk
5. wikipedia.org
6. cnnmobile.com
7. sharemobile.ro
8. onthegrid.com (new)
9. goal.com (8)
10. mjoy.com

Top handsets for February 2010

1. Nokia 3110c
2. Nokia 5130 XpressMusic
3. Nokia 2700c
4. Nokia 2600c
5. Nokia N70
6. Nokia N72
7. Nokia 6300
8. Nokia 2330c
9. Sony Ericsson K750i
10. Nokia 2630

Don’t forget that the above statistics reflect only mobile web usage via Opera Mini only.

You can read and download February 2010′s State of the Mobile Web report from the Opera website.

Opera has released final verions of Opera Mini 5 and Opera Mobile 10. These guys have been busy, and apparently are keen on dominating the mobile web browser scene.

Now, there is an Opera for everyone (almost):

1. Opera Mini 5 for all java-enabled and Blackberry phones

2. Opera Mobile 10 beta for Android

3. Opera Mobile 10 for Windows Mobile

4. Opera Mini 5 beta for Windows Mobile

Opera gives you Top 5 reasons why you cannot live without Opera on your phone:

1. Get the best Internet experience on your phone
Opera delivers the full Web experience on nearly any mobile phone, and it is easy and free to download.

2. No more slow surfing
Opera mobile browsers are designed to boost your browsing speed significantly. Opera brings the best and fastest browsing experience on any mobile phone.

3. Get your mobile phone bills under control
Opera Mini’s compression technology reduces the amount of data sent to your phone by up to 90 percent, resulting in lower costs on pay-per-MB data plans or when roaming.

4. Web made easy, even on your phone
Opera keeps it simple with a sleekly designed user interface, regardless of the phone you are using, and with the same great feature set, such as Speed Dial, tabs, and the password manager.

5. Never leave your personal information behind
Opera Link lets you synchronize your bookmarks, notes and Speed Dial between your computer and your mobile phone. Make your information available wherever you are – at work, at home or on the road.

Download
Download Opera Mini 5 or Opera Mobile 10 directly to your phone from m.opera.com/.

Source

Opera has released a beta of the latest version of their Opera Mobile (not the java Opera Mini) for Symbian S60, and this release is valid for both 3rd and 5th edition devices.

Opera Mobile beta 10 claims to be “faster at rendering pages, zooming, panning and almost everything else you do with a browser. Page downloading is now 50% faster than the previous version of Opera for Symbian/S60 phones.”

In addition, it inlcudes speed dial, tabbed browsing, Opera Turbo, password manager, touch & keypad (for 5th edition devices), adaptive zooming, and AJAX support, among others.

Symbian smartphone users can head over to Opera’s full web site or visit http://m.opera.com/mobile/ on mobile to download Opera Mobile 10 beta right away.

Some screenshots of Opera Mobile running on the Nokia E90:

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It really has been a long time since I used Opera Mobile for anything, but I do remember that the browsing experience with version 9.5 on the Samsungs i780 and i900 was beautiful.

Perhaps that is why I am so unimpressed with what I saw of version 8.65 for Symbian when I tried it out yesterday. For the purpose of information, Opera Mobile 8.65 is the stable version available for most devices. The newer version on steroids, version 9.5, is presently available for only a small range of devices, specifically on the Windows Mobile platform (small wonder too, Pocket Explorer sucks big time!!).

Anyway, Opera Mobile 8.65 simply reminds me of the teething days of the mobile web. Virtually ALL formatting is lost when browsing websites on this browser – font and layout inclusive.

Here are a few screenshots:

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After the first browsing session, I shut down the application. On returning to play with it some more, it simply refused to launch. A re-installation did not help either. I remember this same thing happening when I tried out Opera Mobile 8.65 on another S60 device some time back. I am not sure what is behind this phenomenom. Anyone?

In february, Mobility Nigeria featured a news item on Armenia and Nigeria leading Mobile Web Growth in 2008.

In that article, our editorial team stated as follows:

But at the current growth rate that Nigeria is pushing, it shouldn’t be long before the West African country shows up on the Top 10 list – and probably climb all the way to the top. Nigeria is currently number 12 on the Top 35 countries (unique users) list.

Approximately two months later, that prediction has come to pass.

In an email update we received from Opera this morning, the company stated that “a surge of Opera Mini usage in Nigeria pushed that country into the top 10, displacing Germany“.

For years, I repeatedly stated that mobile is the future of the web. No; desktops and notebooks won’t go away, but mobile devices will become the de facto means of accessing the web. Today, more people access the web via mobile than via PCs. I am not a prophet. But I did say so – years ago.

Here’s a supporting quote from Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera:

“A mobile phone will be the device most people use to access the Web. As millions of people each month discover the Web through Opera Mini, content providers have an incredible opportunity to seize competitive advantage in this new medium. By simply ensuring their content works on any device, they will open themselves to the next generation of Web users.”

I couldn’t have put it better than that.

Related Links:
1. Mobile Data: Bridging The Internet Divide In Africa
2. A Case for Mobile Data

Opera’s State of the Mobile Web presents the statistics for mobile web usage from January 2008 to January 2009 – and the fastest growing mobile web countries are Armenia (with over 2800% growth), followed by Nigeria (with 1854% growth).

According to the report, which is based on usage of the extremely popular Opera Mini browser for mobile phones, other notable countries include: Egypt (1391%), Philippines (570%) and Kazakhstan (419%).

Nigeria is still not in the top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage (ranked by # of unique users). Here’s that list:

1. Russia
2. Indonesia
3. Ukraine
4. China
5. India
6. South Africa
7. United States
8. United Kingdom
9. Poland
10. Germany

But at the current growth rate that Nigeria is pushing, it shouldn’t be long before the West African country shows up on the Top 10 list – and probably climb all the way to the top. Nigeria is currently number 12 on the Top 35 countries (unique users) list.

With a huge chunk of the country’s geographical mass now being covered by fast-growing GSM networks, internet access has reached many hitherto unreachable places for the first time in Nigeria.

And with more people owning and/or having access to mobile phones than PCs, the mobile internet is set to be the next big thing in the country. Nigeria has a population of over 150 million people, most of whom have no access yet to the internet.

The full report is available at: Opera: State of the Mobile Web report.