Today Opera announced (http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2004/06/09/) the availability of a proxy service called Opera Mobile Accelerator which they say can accelerate mobile browsing by 2.5 times, and reduce the amount of data transferred for those browsing with their version 6.31 browser (by stripping out unnecessary data, and compressing what's left).

The service is available by subscription only: 3 months subscription - EUR 12, 6 months subscription - EUR 20, 12 months subscription - EUR 30.

There is also a 14-day free trial period open to everyone.

Hmmm. This is a weird idea. Any idea if this works outside the UK/Europe? Not that I would pay to surf on my phone, when I can do it for free now.... ;)

Btw, Opera is by far the largest (size-wise) of all the mobile browsers, and my experience playing with it was that it was simply not any better than the little 65k Doris browser. Others may argue, but I couldn't get it to do simple things like log into Hotmail.