A visual voice-mail application from PhoneFusion and the Opera Mini 4.2 browser have become available for T-Mobile's G1 smartphone powered by Google's Android mobile operating system. The free Opera Mini browser runs faster than the beta and is also available for the Samsung Instinct and newer phones from Sony Ericsson and Nokia.

A new visual voice-mail application and the Opera Mini browser were made available Monday for T-Mobile's Android-based G1 smartphone.

The Opera Mini 4.2 mobile browser, released as a beta earlier this month, is now out in a free final version. It includes a performance increase of up to 30 percent over the beta, thanks to a farm of U.S.-based servers that preprocess and compress Web requests. It also includes skins, syncing with notes, support for multiple languages, and other features.

'World's Most Popular'

Opera Software describes the browser as "the world's most popular mobile Web browser," with more than 20 million users. Other features include staying in touch with friends via Facebook, searching with Google, and secure online banking,

The browser is also available for the Samsung Instinct and newer Sony Ericsson and Nokia phones. It offers browsing of full Web pages, with the user being able to zoom into a page whose text has been formatted correctly for the small screen.

The Opera Mini browser is available from the Opera Software site, as well as the Android Market, a Google app store comparable to Apple's iPhone App Store. The Android Market is also offering the beta version of Fusion Voicemail Plus from Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based PhoneFusion.

Voicemail Plus lets users centralize voice-mail boxes they may have at home and at work, in addition to the one on their mobile device, and see a list of messages in one place. They can also see information about the messages and play the voice mail from the device.

PhoneFusion, which describes its voice-mail application as "iPhone-like," had previously released the product for BlackBerries and smartphones with Windows Mobile 5 and 6.

Projection of One Million Sales

The availability of the two popular software products could help propel the already growing sales estimates for the G1, manufactured by HTC. On Monday, HTC CEO Peter Chou increased his sales projection, predicting a million units sold by the end of this year, up from his earlier prediction of 600,000.

While some observers are describing the software releases as enabling the G1 to become more "iPhone-like," Current Analysis analyst Avi Greengart said its appeal in the U.S. goes beyond that.

The U.S. "is a carrier-driven market," he said, where users largely choose the carrier first and then the device. For T-Mobile customers, he said, the G1 offers a unique device in the carrier's product line -- a high-end touchscreen smartphone with Google's mobile operating system.

At the moment, he said, the G1 "feels half-finished" because of the limited selection of available applications. But, Greengart noted, the other big factor in the G1's favor is "the promise of what people will be able to add."