rlsblog

Opera Mini runs on any Java-enabled non-smartphone, like the several Series 40 phones that Nokia sells cheap, and gives access to a better looking web than the default WAP browsers on those phones.

The handset only needs to run a small (50-100 KB) Java client to access the web, which is like a VNC or Terminal Services client of sorts. Opera Mini uses a remote proxy server to pre-process the web page instead of requiring the phone to process them. When a user requests for a webpage, it is fetched by the Opera Mini server and reformatted with Small Screen Rendering technology, compressing it further by about 70-80%, and is finally sent to the handset as output. This feature optimizes the browsing for phones with very low resources, or low bandwidth connections, as well as low screen real-estate.