Opera Mini is a popular mobile browser mainly because of the way it compresses websites and images before these are downloaded by the smartphone. This significantly reduces bandwidth consumption, which can help save on phone bills, at least for non-unlimited plans. It seems Opera Mini has a new update, and it involves not just mobile web, but also adds a social aspect.

Opera Mini 7.5 just launched, and it introduces three new features that will help improve your mobile browsing experience. These are brought by the new Smart Page, which basically offers an overview of the latest news and content from around the web, your friends and your location.

• Social tab – This tab offers an overview of updates from within your social network, including Facebook and Twitter;
• News – Opera Mini pulls in news content from relevant websites. The browser even studies your browsing habits and preferences in choosing which websites to show;
• Suggested links – This tab will pull in feeds from your region (based on the location set on Android settings).

These features can be time-savers for folks who want all their relevant content in one convenient place. Of course, there might be privacy issues, especially for users concerned with sending back browsing habits and information to the server. But given that Opera Mini reduces bandwidth usage through its proxies, then users should already be aware of the fact that the browser pre-processes content on Opera's servers in the first place.

Interested? Check out the video below.