Opera Software has announced the release of its latest (June 2011) State of the Mobile Web Report, which shines the mobile browsing torch onto the African region.

Between June 2010 to June 2011, page views in the top ten countries of Africa increased by 187%, unique users increased by 184% and data transferred increased by 199%. The top ten countries using the Opera Mini browser in this region are Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya, Ghana, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Zambia and Morocco.

The Opera Mini browser is very popular on the African continent, being used by 72% of all mobile web users in Africa.

Zimbabwe featuring prominently

Zimbabwe and Morocco lead the top ten countries of the region in terms of page-view growth (4964.8 % and 1598.4 % respectively). Zimbabwe and Ethiopia also edges ahead when it comes to growth of unique users (4483.3 % and 989.5 % respectively) in the region.

Coming up tops again in terms of the growth of data transferred (3449.7 % and 1385.9 %, respectively) is Zimbabwe and Morocco. Our brothers up north lead the top ten countries of the region in page views per user, with each user browsing 713 pages on average each month. Among the countries of Africa, the most popular sites include social networking giant Facebook, search behemoth Google, YouTube, Yahoo as well as Wikipedia.

Opera Software also looked at the top ten handsets used in each of the top ten African countries. Out of the 100 total handsets listed, 89 of them were Nokia phones, showing that although the Finnish company’s sales saw serious decline elsewhere, it still has massive support on the African continent where feature phones rule the roost. Of the remaining 11 handsets, seven were manufactured by Samsung, with one each by Sony Ericsson, Alcatel, Apple and LG.

In related news Opera Software also released its Opera 11.50 PC browser and new versions of its mobile browsers (Opera Mini 6.1 and Opera Mobile 11.1) recently.