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By 20 January 2011 | Categories: news

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As was already evident last year in July with the release of Opera Software’s State of the Mobile Web Report for June, the use of mobile phones to access the web is exploding on the African continent. The latest edition (December 2010), again pays special attention to the region of Africa.
 
According to the latest report, the top 10 countries using Opera Mini to browse the mobile web on the African continent is South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Kenya, Ghana, Sudan, Libya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Namibia.
 
Over the course of the year (between December 2009 and December 2010), webpage views in these countries has increased by 365%, whilst unique users increased by 176% and data transferred increased by 331%.
 
Sudan and Zimbabwe lead the top 10 African countries in terms of page-view growth (4908.2 % and 2321.6 % respectively), growth of unique users (1219.4 % and 1719.3 %) as well as the increase in data transferred (3672.6 % and 1449.5 %). Zimbabwe is also at the forefront when it comes to page views per user with 830 pages browsed by each user on average per month, almost double (436) the number of monthly pages that South African users visit on average per month. 
 
Social networking behemoth Facebook is vying against internet search giant Google for the attention of the continent’s mobile web browsers, with the former being the most visited site in 6 out of the top 10 countries (including SA with mxit.com placing 3rd), whilst Google placed number one in the remaining four countries. YouTube, Yahoo as well as Wikipedia also featured high on the list of mobile sites visited.
 
The world’s biggest phone maker, Nokia, is also quite popular in Africa for users of Opera Mini. When it comes to the top 10 handsets being used in each of the top 10 African countries, the entire top 10 list in 6 out of the 10 countries consisted of only Nokia phones.

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