[barredo]

I said it earlier and my ideas are:

1) brand awareness (people will actually start to know Opera web browsing solutions/Opera Software, which is a small brand/browser compared to Firefox or Chrome, don't even mention IE)

2) they make money driving traffic to the default websites on Opera Mini's speed dial homepage

[jarek]

I suspect the brand awareness and popularity numbers (50 million users or whatever) are helpful when it comes to negotiations with manufacturers or carriers who might want to bundle the browser with phones out of the box. I expect Opera gets paid decently for that.