Virgin Mobile USA will be launching Virgin Mobile "Connect" and Opera Mini 4.2 later this month, giving its more than five million prepaid customers more ways to optimize their mobile experience. Customers can take advantage of these new included services by signing up for any monthly or prepaid data pack plan ranging from $5 for 5MB of data on prepaid plans to $10 for 50 MB of data on a monthly plan.

Virgin Mobile to Launch Virgin Mobile "Connect" and Opera Mini 4.2

April 1, 2009 6:33 PM | Virgin Mobile | Comments (0)


Virgin Mobile USA will be launching Virgin Mobile "Connect" and Opera Mini 4.2 later this month, giving its more than five million prepaid customers more ways to optimize their mobile experience. Customers can take advantage of these new included services by signing up for any monthly or prepaid data pack plan ranging from $5 for 5MB of data on prepaid plans to $10 for 50 MB of data on a monthly plan.

"Connect," a social networking dashboard, was originally launched on Virgin Mobile USA postpaid devices in November 2008. Connect will be available to those Virgin Mobile USA's prepaid customers on many devices including the Shuttle, Jax or X-tc handsets. Since Connect launched in November, about 30% of customers using Helio devices have logged on to Connect to stay in touch with their social networks.

The Connect interface allows customers to connect directly to Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and YouTube. Now instead of having to log in and out of one social networking site in order to access another, customers use Connect to conveniently aggregate status updates, invitations and requests, new photos and videos, comments, messages and more, all in one place, free of charge. Virgin Mobile USA customers can also use Connect's integrated standard RSS reader to stay up-to-date with their favorite news sites, blogs and e-zines.

Opera Mini 4.2

Opera Mini will enable Virgin Mobile USA prepaid customers to enhance their web mobile browsing experience. Opera Mini 4.2 provides a richer mobile Internet access experience using Opera Software's data compression technology while providing a desktop-like browser experience. Additional features included in the Opera Mini 4.2 release include:

* Personalization through customized skins
* Optional bookmark synching with a personal computer or another mobile device with installation of the Opera browser product
* Notes and speed dial available from Opera Broswer
* Ability to view pages in landscape mode on select devices
* Scrolling short cuts

Opera Mini 4.2 will be available on most Virgin Mobile USA prepaid handsets including Slash, Shuttle, Arc and select postpaid handsets including the Ocean 2. Opera Mini has more than 20 million users and has more than 7.5 billion page views per month.

Prepaid Data Packs:

These new applications are all free and included as part of any data pack plan. Virgin Mobile USA customers can sign up for a variety of optimized data packs depending on their usage:

If They Are Pay As You Go Customers:

* $5 data pack = 5MB of data
* $10 data pack = 20MB of data and unlimited access to VirginXL
* $20 data pack = 50MB of data and unlimited access to VirginXL

For Those On Monthly Plans Without Annual Contracts:

* $5 data pack = 20MB data and unlimited access to VirginXL
* $10 data pack = 50MB of data and unlimited access to VirginXL

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