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Movistar Colombia picks up Opera Mini in a stride toward mobile browsing in Latin America

Opera Software today announced that Telefónica has expanded on its reach in Latin America to make mobile Web browsing available to all of their subscribers in Colombia with Opera Mini for Movistar Colombia. A localized version of Opera Mini that features Spanish menus and bookmarks of popular local sites was first released with Movistar Mexico earlier this year. Today, Opera Mini is made directly available to the more than 9 million Movistar Colombia subscribers free of charge at both mini.opera.com/movistarcolombia, as well as via SMS push.

Opera Mini is designed to enable the Web on a full range of mobile phones and currently runs on more than 700 handset models. With more than 17 million unique monthly users worldwide, Opera Mini delivers the promise of a desktop-like browsing experience and is the world's most popular mobile Web browser. Popular sites visited by Opera Mini users in Colombia are mostly social-networking or user-generated sites, such as facebook.com, hi5.com, google.com and eltiempo.com.

"Operators in Latin America, such as Movistar Colombia, recognize how Opera Mini can instantly deploy a user-friendly Web browsing experience. Thanks to Opera Mini, Movistar Colombia subscribers can access any Web site on any telephone that they offer," says Rod Hamlin, SVP Sales for the Americas, Opera Software.

Customizing menus and bookmarks for Colombia enhances the Opera Mini that is popular around the world for subscribers of Telefónica Móviles, Movistar Colombia.

"Choosing Opera Mini to provide Movistar Colombia subscribers a full and fast Web experience without requiring any development or production was a natural decision," says Rafael Peña, Director of Added Value Services, Movistar Colombia. "Today Movistar Colombia subscribers can download Opera Mini and begin enjoying mobile Web browsing at high speeds and low costs thanks to our data plans described at www.movistar.com.co/operamini."

Opera Mini pre-processes and compresses Web pages by up to 90 percent before sending them to mobile phones, resulting in faster page downloads. Advanced features such as Opera Zoom make page navigation intuitive on a small screen.