Yes Opera Mobile has the turbo mode which is similar to this technology http://www.opera.com/turbo where it proxies the connection and compresses the data.

Opera Mini on the other hand uses OBML http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-binary-markup-langu... which is an entirely different thing.

OBML is a superset of a compressing proxy.

I look forward to the articles in a year's time pointing out that "Little-known browser Opera now offers a data compressing proxy mode similar to the system Chrome's used for almost twelve months."

Yeah, I remember having it on Opera Mini on my old Sony Ericsson, prior to the advent of 3G networks. It was extremely useful, actually.

Oh Yes, sorry I meant Opera "Mini"! Opera Mobile is a full fledged mobile browser instead.

No you were right. Opera Mobile has a "Turbo" mode that does almost the same thing as this. Opera Mini is a bit more extreme.

Though there seems to be some confusion as Opera have been talking about combining both Mobile and Mini into one browser, and the new Webkit beta seems to be it. No one seems to know exactly which bits of each service have been retained.

Now called Off road mode.