Opera has launched its latest smartphone browser for Android in beta as it attempts to take a lead in the developed markets.

Having ditched its proprietary platform, Presto, the Opera 14 browser uses open source WebKit software. Jeremy Forrester, business development at Opera, told us at Mobile World Congress that this enables their engineers to focus on new products.

Opera Mini has already been hugely successful in emerging markets, with more than 200m users, as it automatically offloads the ‘heavy work’ of web browsing to the company’s servers so it works on low-end feature phones. The Opera for Android app running the latest browser software incorporates this compression technology, enabling browsers to turn on the ‘off road’ feature when they are roaming or in a bad coverage area to save them money.

“Our new smartphone product will make us much more competitive in the established markets – this will be a really interesting year for us,” Forrester said. Opera for Android has an updated user interface built to the native specifications of the Android platform, has a discover feature to provide a new way of finding content based on your interests, offers tabbed browsing and the ability to save web pages for reading offline.