According to a recent survey of its Mini browser users, Opera software found that there was a significantly faster growth in the number of females accessing the internet from their mobile phones than there were males.

In the survey the number of men using the mini browser grew by 233 percent whilst the number of women grew by 575 percent over a two year period. The highest proportion of female users in the countries that were surveyed were in South Africa at 43.5 percent with the US, Russia and the UK containing the next highest percentages.

Opera reported that as of the 10th August as many as 300 000 responses had been collected from the survey which had been displayed on the handsets of Mini users and had been sent out in 9 different languages to a total of 15 countries.

India and Nigeria appeared at the other end of the scale as the countries having the lowest proportion of female users with only 4 percent and 5.4 percent respectively represented by female users and these two countries were followed by China and Vietnam.

Opera claimed that in general people on the whole were becoming increasingly aware of the idea of using their mobile handsets to access the internet. A spokeswoman for Opera said that the ever increasing media coverage of mobile web browsing combined with more options being offered by operators and word of mouth were all instrumental in this increased awareness.

According to a principal analyst at Gartner Research, Roberta Cozza it is the applications and not the hardware that is the reason for the growth in female users. She advised that creating applications that help women handle both family and work life were the key to attracting female users and not the introduction of pink mobile handsets.

Source – PC World