Norwegian Web browser developer Opera reports that their Java based Opera Mini mobile phone browser is in use by over 20 million phones in Russia and the CIS, showing a 160% growth since February of 2008.  Use of the mobile browser also grew 290% to 7.3 billion page views. Russia and Ukraine are the top two users of Opera Mini, and Nokia phones are the most popular devices for the browser’s use.

The numbers from Russia are substantially higher than in the United States, which ranks 4th on the overall list of Top Opera Mini Using Countries.  This is most likely due to the generally close nature of US handset operating systems, being proprietary to the carrier itself.

The majority of the growth was seen in European countries, where the percentage of increases in downloads, sites visited, and pages viewed jumped by a few hundred, if not thousand percent.

[Via Cellular-News]