Well, here is a story that satiates both needs. Mobile browser Opera Mini is predicting the winner of Super Bowl XLVI. By crunching aggregated anonymous traffic data, Opera Mini has correctly predicted the winners of five of the last six NFL playoff games. That is a lot better than the so-called sports experts. If you are betting on the game, maybe Opera is your new go-to source for inside info. What team does Opera have winning the big game?

None of that matters to Opera Mini. This is pure data analysis to make any geek's heart go pitter-patter. What Opera Mini does is look at traffic going through its mobile browser to each team's official website. In the division round, Opera Mini predicted that the Patriots would beat Tim Tebow and the Broncos, the Ravens would beat the Texans, the high-flying Packers would beat the New York Giants and the 49ers would put down the New Orleans Saints.

Opera did pretty well. The Giants upset the Packers. We will give Opera a pass on that prediction because, really, no one actually expected New York to beat Green Bay. My family was not terribly pleased with that outcome, by the way, being Wisconsin natives.

In the AFC/NFC championship games, Opera correctly predicted the Giants and the Patriots to win their games over the 49ers and Ravens, respectively.

To put it in perspective, professional pundits and Las Vegas odds makers are right about 55% of the time over the course of an NFL season.

And here we are, Super Sunday.

Opera Mini predicts that New England will get its redemption this time over the Giants.

"I'm betting everything I have in my online betting account at the moment on the Patriots," said Nils Brostrom, VP of communications for Opera Software in a release. "That means if the analysis is correct, I get a whopping $26 on the Patriots winning the Super Bowl."

Opera Mini also announced that it had 152.6 million global unique visitors in December 2011. That is an increase of 78.45% since December 2010.

Who are you rooting for in the Super Bowl? Being a New England native, I am a little biased. My prediction? Tom Brady and the Patriots will win it 31-24 over Eli Manning and the Giants. What is your prediction?

As you can see from the video (and the title of this article), the newest version of Opera is pretty quick. When placed side-by-side with an iPhone 4, an HTC Desire running the latest Opera browser has no trouble outpacing Safari. In some cases the difference is minor, but with full pages, Opera loads several seconds faster. Opera has also improved on the browser's ability to zoom and scroll - both of which happen much faster and more smoothly.

Opera 5.0 on the iPhone looks broken and choppy when placed next to its 5.1 counterpart on the Android. Tabbed browsing is much more enjoyable on 5.1 and the ability to let pages load in a new tab in the background - something Safari won't do - is a nice way to be more efficient.

One of the downsides to Opera Mini is that is doesn't support Flash the way the default Android browser does. When I tested a few Flash features that work in the default browser, Opera was unable to play them. The lack of Flash could be a deal-breaker for some Android users, but regular browsing is much faster than the default browser, which could bridge some of that gap.

As an iPhone user, the future of Opera on the platform seems exciting if the company can bring the speed and snappiness over from Android. The only problem is Apple won't allow users to change the default browser, so clicking links in emails or apps won't automatically launch Opera - a feature Android, on the other hand, does provide.

If you've used Opera Mini for other mobile platforms, such as Blackberry or Android, then its pretty much the same. But, for those of you like myself that haven't, here's what we have to say about it.

A main hitch in using Opera on the iPhone, however, is the inability to set it as your default browser. Opening up links in your Twitter client will still bring you back to Safari, as will opening up PDF files in Opera. You're constantly reminded that Opera is number two in line and, even if you place it in the dock at the bottom of your screen, Safari is never far behind.

We asked Opera if the iPhone version would be able to take advantage of HTML5 and Javascript and were told that, while Javascript works "surprisingly well", a spokesperson could not say that Opera Mini "takes full advantage of HTML5". Opera also told us that the iPhone version will generally work with bookmarklets for services like InstaPaper and ReadItLater.

In all, Opera seems like a viable alternative to Safari on the iPhone, but we're not sure that it can take over the number one spot. It has some bells and whistles, like the frequently-visited page startup page, but without being able to set it as the default browser, it will likely remain a second class citizen.

What do you think? Will you be switching over to Opera for the iPhone, to whatever extent that you can?

The company said in its blog this morning that its mobile browser, Opera Mini, has generated more than $1.2 billion per year for mobile operators.

Opera says in its post that its Opera Mini users generate nearly $4 billion in revenue for mobile operators, using $1 per megabyte as a standard.

The quote from Jon von Tetzchner, Opera's co-founder, says it all.

"We like to think of Opera Mini as a win-win solution. Consumers who would otherwise not pay for the mobile Web can do so without fear of 'sticker shock' when they see their bill. People paying for a flat-rate data plan can enjoy quick and hassle-free browsing over EDGE or 3G connections. Operators attract new customers for their data packages, and their strained networks can catch their breath while our servers do the heavy lifting."

"Who could pass up such an opportunity?" Opera seems to be saying. And for iPhone users, who are required to buy an unlimited data plan, the winner here would be AT&T, because Opera uses a compression system that the company claims can compress data by up to 90%. For some iPhone apps, like Skype and Sling, overuse of the 3G network was a claimed concern. With compression, AT&T could serve up the same or better experience while using less bandwidth.

In case you were wondering, it's been just over six days and three hours since Opera submitted its mini browser to the App Store.

Opera Mini is already available on a large number of platforms, including Symbian and Android. The iPhone, however, has remained off-limits for any browser besides Apple's own Safari. There are a few apps that use Safari's rendering engine to create new browser experiences, but we haven't seen any browsers that use alternative rendering engines on the iPhone yet.

While Mozilla is moving forward with its mobile projects for Windows Mobile, Android and Maemo, there are no current plans to port Firefox to the iPhone yet.

This will be an interesting test case. Opera, of course, can show any demo it wants to - but until the company submits the app to Apple, we won't know how Apple will react. Or perhaps this is just a publicity stunt by Opera.

Recently, Mozilla released Fennec 3, the third beta version of the company's open-source touch mobile browser. In January 2008, ReadWriteWeb compared Opera Mini to the promises of the much anticipated Firefox mobile browser. A year later, Mozilla fans are still waiting and Opera Mini users continue to enjoy synced bookmarks and notes, skinning features, relatively fast downloads and increased video capabilities. From more than 1500 votes within the GetJar community, Opera Mini 4.2 has earned an 8.1 out of 10 user rating. But it will be interesting to see if die-hard Mozilla fans will sing the praises of Fennec.

To read GetJar's Opera Mini reviews or to download the app, visit the community's browser page. Or if you've got a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet and would like to test Fennec, download it here.

As of last month, more than 23 million mobile web surfers used Opera Mini to surf more than 8.6 billion pages in March, which equates to 148 million megabytes of data sent to handsets worldwide. Since Opera Mini compresses data before sending, that number actually represents 1.4 petabytes (PB) of uncompressed data. Data traffic is up 319%, year-over-year, and page views have increased by 255%.

Latin America Goes Mobile

This latest report from Opera focuses on Latin America. In that region, Chile went from ninth to first, overall, as Chilean mobile web use increased by 3200% over the past year. Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina followed to round out the top five.

In the region, Opera was able to determine which sites are being accessed the most by web surfers. According to their findings, Google, Live.com, and Facebook all do well in Latin America and Orkut remains the top social network in Brazil and Paraguay. Smaller social networking sites like hi5 are also popular in many countries.

Worldwide, Mobile Web Grows & Grows

Elsewhere in the world, the mobile web continues to grow rapidly. Opera found triple-digit pageview growth in most countries with double-digit user increases in all countries. Nigeria is the only exception as it experienced a more than 4000% pageview growth and 1500% user growth since March 2008.

The report delves into data from several different countries in order to provide statistics on pageview and user growth, top web sites, and top handsets for that region. Here, you can discover interesting tidbits like this: the top site in China is kong.net, a mobile portal that provides media, entertainment offerings, and community services. And, although Google makes the top 10 sites lists in many counties, in the Ukraine it's nowhere to be found. You can also see how popular Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung handsets are in other parts of the world.

Opera CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, reminds us that "a mobile phone will be the device most people use to access the web." Looking back through these numbers, it's easy to see how true that statement really is today.