Opera Mini browser for mobile phones is now available for the Android platform. A technical preview release is available at labs.opera.com today. Opera Mini enables Web browsing from low-to-high resource handsets by compressing data at a remote server before sending content to the phone applet for rendering.

“Today we’re glad to deliver our mass-market mobile browser to the Android development groups,” says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. “Opera Mini will be able to empower users of Android-based handsets with access to all of their favorite Web sites with popular features for smooth effects and scalable, tailored viewing.”

There is no hardware available that will run Android, but you can still try the Opera Mini Android version out using the Android SDK and emulator. Here’s how (these steps are basically the same on any platform that runs the SDK):

1. Download and install latest version of Android SDK
2. Obtain the Opera Mini for Android package
3. Once you have installed the Android SDK, start the Android emulator that comes with it (this can be found at {Android home}/tools/emulator
4. Transfer and install the Opera Mini package into the emulator - you can do this with the following command line input - {Android home}/tools/adb install OperaMini.apk
5. Opera Mini should now appear in the emulator Applications folder.