Opera recently released its monthly State of the Mobile Web report for July, offering up in-depth insight into all facets of mobile Web usage worldwide.  As usual, this month’s report has some surprising data.

For July, Opera Mini saw increases in all three categories of growth including unique users, pages viewed and data consumed.  In all, 62.3 million people used Opera Mini in July, 29.6 billion pages were served and 4.1 petabytes of operator data were compressed.  Yes, that’s PETAbytes.

In terms of growth worldwide, Asia showed the most substantial gains.  From July 2009 to July 2010, pageviews in the top 10 countries in Southeast Asia increased by 238%, unique users increased by 205% and the amount of data transferred increased by 227%.

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Opera recently released its State of the Mobile Web report for June, showing decreases for the first time in all three growth categories — unique users, pages viewed and data consumed.

While there were decreases across the board, Opera attributes it to “certain countries where we have experienced some technical and political challenges that now are about to be solved.”  Still, Opera had over 59.4M users as of June 2010 – a 3.2% decrease from May, but an increase of 124.7% since June 2009.  Opera users viewed over 27.3 billion pages in June, down 3.4% since May, but an increase of 161.8% since June of 2009.  As for data consumed, users generated over 416 million MB of data for operators worldwide.  Since May, the data consumed went down by 4%, but is up 147.1% since June of 2009.

This month’s report was focused on the mobile Web’s role in the 2010 FIFA World Cup, and as such, listed the top 5 global sports sites in terms of usage during the month of June.  ’Goal.com’ came in at number one, followed by ‘livescore.com,’ ‘fifa.com,’ ‘m.championat.ru’ and ‘m.espn.go.com’ respectively.  Also highlighted was mobile Web usage and trends in Africa.

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Taptu has published its latest Touch-Friendly Web Report for May, in which it focuses on sports-related mobile sites to dissect the “sports web phenomenon on touchscreen phones.”

Mobile sites in the sports vertical are immensely popular these days, and the report notes the sheer quantity of touch-friendly sport sites that now exist and how good they are.  Though similar apps exist in various app stores, the same score and match information can be found on the mobile Web for free.  In the case of ESPN, up to June 23rd (the day of the US-Algeria game) , their FIFA World Cup 2010 iPhone app saw 31 million visits and their mobile site, a further 20 million visits- impressive stats to say the least.

What’s interesting in the report is the comparison of leading sports sites’ mobile apps vs. their mobile Web counterpart.  ESPN, for example, has a leading mobile Website and mobile app, yet they both differ in what they offer.  Both are free and offer all the live scores, news, stats and updates you’d need, yet the mobile app allows for extensive customization and advanced video, while the mobile Website doesn’t.  Another advantage of the mobile site is the fact that i’ts available on any platform, while the mobile app is only available on the iPhone.

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Opera today published its latest State of the Mobile Web report for May, in which some interest tidbits were highlighted.  First things first, however, Opera saw increases in all three categories of growth in May 2010: unique users, pages viewed and data consumed.  In all, 61.4 million people used Opera Mini in May, 28.3 billion pages were served and 4.0 petabytes of operator data were compressed for Opera Mini users.

Russia has long been the top country in terms of Opera Mini users, but in May, Indonesia took the top spot.  Also in May, Nigeria surged ahead of Ukraine, South Africa and the United States, while South Africa also jumped ahead of the United States.  Interestingly, in all of the top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage, the prime time for browsing was at night — 8pm to midnight — which falls in line with other reports we’ve seen.

This month’s report focused on Latin America and its tendencies for mobile Web consumption.  Peru and Ecuador lead the top 10 countries of the region in terms of page-view growth (1,213.3% and 515.4%, respectively), while Colombia and Brazil lead the top 10 countries of the region in growth of unique users (322.4% and 303.6%, respectively).  Costa Rica leads the top 10 countries of the region in page views per user, with each user browsing 426 pages on average each month.

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The mobile Web, though slow going in the beginning, is now growing by leaps and bounds- as evident in the enormous traffic spike seen to the U.S. Golf Administration’s U.S. Open mobile site during the tournament.

The USGA and IBM — who runs its Websites — released figures yesterday reporting that 1.7 million people visited the U.S. Open’s mobile site, which represents a 518 percent increase from last year.   In contrast, the regular site saw 4.2 million visitors during the week, up only 8 percent over the previous year’s totals.  These figures show that nearly 30 percent of the traffic to the U.S. Open’s sites were from mobile devices.

What’s interesting is that the mobile site was pretty stripped down, with an all-text news feed, scores, tee times and some basic video.  This proves that mobile users are primarily after quick information and updates rather than flashy graphics and deep interactivity (in some cases, that is).  This is pretty impressive, and shows that the mobile Web is becoming more important than the traditional Web in a growing number of areas.

Mozilla revealed this week that it will introduce a new application for the iPhone called “Firefox Home.”

The app will allow users to gain remote access to their desktop browser data, like browsing history and even the tabs last used in a Firefox session.

“Firefox Home” represents the most sophisticated attempt by Mozilla yet to pacify Firefox fanatics who want to extend their comforts of Mozilla to the iPhone. Moreover, the app also serves up the Firefox “Awesome Bar” capability, which simplifies the process by which individuals can access their favorite websites.

“Firefox Home for iPhone is part of a broader Mozilla effort to provide a more personal web experience with more user control,” says Mozilla Labs product manager Ragavan Srinivasan.

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In its latest Mobile Touch Web Report for Q1 2010, Taptu reveals the mobile touch Web has grown 35 percent since last quarter, which represents a 232 percent annual growth rate overall.

This puts its growth ahead of the App Store, currently showing an annual growth of 144 percent, but behind the Android Market growing at an annual rate of 403 percent.  The report also shows the number of mobile touch Web sites rose to 440,100 from 326,600 in January.

At the current run rate, the report predicts that the mobile  touch Web will increase to 1.1 million sites by the end of the year, nearly twice Taptu’s original forecast, and nearly a full year ahead of  its January prediction, fueled in part by the continued consumer love affair with touch-screen phones, and even more importantly the rising sales of mid-range touch-enabled devices.

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