Opera has released the first of what it says will be regular 'State of the Mobile Web' reports . It shows that, in Q1 2008, the number of people who downloaded and used Opera Mini grew 26 percent over the prior quarter and that, in the first three months of 2008, the number of pages viewed through Opera Mini grew almost 57 percent over the last quarter of 2007, to 2.4 billion. In March, each person using Opera Mini viewed 202 pages on average.

In March 2008, 11.9 million Opera Mini users generated more than 33,000 Gbytes of data for operators worldwide, approximately 88 percent more than in the previous quarter.

According to Opera, social networking consumes almost 41 percent of traffic: The United States, South Africa and Indonesia have more than 60 percent of their traffic going to social networks. Full Web surfing accounted for more than 77 percent of all traffic and WAP content the remaining 23 percent. "WAP percentages have declined somewhat as more consumers realise Opera Mini can access rich Web content," according to Opera.

The report contains statistics on the most popular sites in the top 10 Opera Mini countries by usage. Subsequent reports will include updates for these countries as well as different regions around the world.