OPERA SOFTWARE has announced the availablity of its Opera Mini browser for mobile phones for the Android platform.

The outfit has made technical preview release is available here for the Android development community to fiddle with.

Opera Mini for Android makes the company's fast-performing and device-adapting Web experience available to any range of handset built on Android.

Opera is renowned for its cross-platform portability and today's release embraces the Android platform in Opera's commitment to making the best Internet experience available on any device.

Opera CEO,Jon von Tetzchner, said. "Opera Mini will be able to empower users of Android-based handsets with access to all of their favourite Web sites with popular features for smooth effects and scalable, tailored viewing."

Opera Mini apparently boasts more than 40 million users worldwide. It compresses data at a remote server before sending content to the phone applet for rendering. This the firm says, enables desktop-like Web browsing from a mobile phone. µ