Opera Releases Mobile Browser for China With Weibo Support

nHorizon Innovation, a joint venture between Opera and Chinese mobile phone distributor Telling Telecom, has today launched a mobile browser targeting Chinese users. Named Oupeng, the new browser will feature embedded support for the popular Sina Weibo.

Just like HTC’s recent addition of a dedicated Weibo button on its Weike phone, we thought that this special accommodation for Weibo was interesting. So we got in touch with Opera’s communications manager in China, Richard Gao, and he gave us a little more information about the new mobile browser’s Weibo support. He explained:

Oupeng pre-installs a Speed Dial link to Weibo. When the use click the link, other than simply re-directing to the website, it actually opens an App-like page. The user can do most Weibo activities in it, such as log in/out, comment, forward, share, and more, just like doing it in a native Weibo Application.

Weibo app-like page

Oupeng News

I asked Richard if he could provide a few screenshots and he was nice enough to oblige (see above). You can see in the picture to the left how this mobile web-app looks. Richard also explained that the Weibo integration also makes use of Weibo in its content channels:

Oupeng provides up-to-date real-time categorized information generated automatically from hot topics/microblogs circulated around Weibo. We have prepared several channels — News, Sports, Entertainment, Finance, etc. Users can add them to Speed Dial then they can access the information with one click.

Opera’s support for Weibo is a big vote of confidence for Sina’s microblog. If you’d like to learn more about it, you can download Oupeng right now from Oupeng.com.