Daily Bits

Apple Approves Opera Mini for iPhone

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Opera continues its trip across various platforms as its Opera Mini browser app has just been approved by Apple. Expect the Opera Mini app to make its appearance in the Apps Store anytime now. Depending on your iTunes, setting the Opera Mini app will be available for free download within 24 hours.

It comes as a surprise that Apple approves the Opera Mini browser since it will definitely compete with Apple’s very own Safari browser on the iPhone and iPod Touch. But it just shows how open Apple is when it comes to competition, although I’m pretty sure that the Opera Mini is not the first approved app which directly competes with an Apple service.

So what does the Opera Mini app brings to the iPhone/iPod Touch table? A couple of good features actually topped by its fast mobile web browsing capability. Credit should be attributed of course to Opera Mini’s compression of web data by up to 90% before sending them to the iPhone/iPod Touch. This results to faster page loading.

Opera Mini will be most useful if your iPhone is running on slower networks such as 2G EDGE. It works great with iPhone 3G and 3GS models and would save you some precious data charges when browsing the web using your iPhone due to data compression.

“We are delighted to offer iPhone and iPod touch users a great browsing experience with the Opera Mini App,” said Lars Boilesen, CEO, Opera Software. “This app is another step toward Opera’s goal of bringing the Web to more people in more places.”

Alright, I know that you’re probably grown tired of using the iPhone/iPod Touch’s Safari browser. Time for a cool change. Check out Opera Mini for iPhone/iPod Touch now.  You may also want to watch a short video demonstrating the features of the Opera Mini browser on iPhone (check out the video after the jump). [Read more…] about Apple Approves Opera Mini for iPhone

Twitter Acquires Tweetie iPhone App

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For quite some time now, despite being one of the top social media service, Twitter has not been so active in the mobile scene.  There are third-party iPhone apps available on various mobile platforms, but none has been coming from Twitter itself.

So after releasing the public beta version of the Twitter for BlackBerry app, Twitter’s next target to fulfill its quest of establishing a mobile presence is the iPhone. Twitter has just acquired Tweetie iPhone app  from AteBits. Tweetie will be renamed as the Twitter for iPhone.

Tweetie is one of  the most popular and widely used Twitter app for iPhone. What’s good about this acquisition and interesting as well is that Twitter plans to release Twitter for iPhone as a free app on the Apps Store. Currently, Tweetie is priced $2.99. So, we should also expect that Twitter for iPhone will be available as an ad-supported app.

Loren Brichter, Tweetie’s owner and developer will become part of the Twitter mobile team. In addition, once the Twitter for iPhone is released, an iPad application will also be released.

Will this spike up Twitter’s clout establishing itself at par with Facebook? Only time can tell. Will you be getting Twitter for iPhone once it gets out? Or are you sticking with your current third-party Twitter app?

Farmville Player Spent £900 Using His Savings and Mother’s Credit Card

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I saw this news covered by a local news program yesterday but at first I didn’t give it much thought since I was waiting the the news program’s coverage of the iPad. Then I saw this new hitting the Techmeme’s headline right now and decided to give it a run.

After reading what happened to the 12-year old kid who spent £900 buying Farmville virtual goods, I could not help but sigh and felt relief that it didn’t happen to me. Two of my teen-age kids are into Farmville as well. But they don’t have access to my credit card.

So, the story goes that the kid spent around $900 to purchase Farmville goods using her mother’s credit card and his own savings. The credit card was used by the kid without her mother’s knowledge. All in the name of putting up the “coolest” farm in Facebook.

Zynga, the game developer refused to refund the amount since the kid lives in her mother’s house.  While the credit card company would only refund if the mother will report his son to the police and give him a police record. Now, what kind of mother would do that to her own son?

So, now. The son’s Farmville account was cancelled. The mother and the kid lost quite a sum of money. And Zynga earns. What a crappy system, right?

The kid and his mother should have read TechCrunch’s series on game monetization schemes of Zynga. This could have been prevented from happening.

Lessons learned?  You know that already.

iPad Official Numbers are Out, 450,000 Units Sold

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Just before Steve Jobs announced the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0, he also presented some official information about the iPad, one week after it was made available. The numbers although not that impressive are interesting enough and worthy of a second look from us.

According to Apple, around 450,000 iPads were already sold. First day sales figure was officially at around 300,000 units. While the iPad was able to beat the opening weekend sale of the first gen iPhone (around 250,000), the iPhone 3G however managed to get a sale of around 1 million units when it first came out in July 2008.

The iPad 3G versions won’t be coming out until last week of April. So we don’t know yet whether it would add up to the iPad’s current sales performance, or even perhaps whether it could match up the sales of the iPhone 3G. But then, these two Apple devices are different from each other so it’s not likely that the iPad could match with the sales performance of the iPhone. And both devices have their specific target consumers as well. But we have yet to see. Perhaps there are more buyers who are waiting for the iPad 3G.

Moving on to the stats on iPad apps. Apple was proud to report that about 1 million iPad apps were already downloaded from the App Store on the first day. Right now, total apps downloaded stand at around 3.5 million.

Now here’s the more interesting bit, there were 250,000 books downloaded from the iBookstore on the first day. And this increased to 600,000 downloaded books today.  What the numbers don’t say though is how many of these books were free and how many were paid. If Apple could determine these and present the figures, we would know whether the iPad is really a serious to Kindle and other e-readers.

Mayorship is a Serious Business, Says Foursquare

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One of the major reasons why you would probably use Foursquare are the cool mayorship titles that you get to earn once you’ve checked on a particular location for several times. You earn the mayorship title and you get to share the information with your Foursquare friends. This mayorship title must be so coveted that some Foursquare users are gaming the system – that is checking in on place even if they have not visited the place at all.

Some honest Foursquare members knew about this and have asked Foursquare to resolve the issue.  The folks at Foursquare admitted that validating every user check-ins is quite a tricky task. But still, they’ve managed to come up with work-arounds to ensure that all check-ins made by Foursquare membes are legit.

Recently Foursquare started utilizing the GPS features of most mobile phones to track whether the check-in made by a user is legitimate.  For users with phones that have no GPS, Foursquare says that they are using a different trick, although it was not mentioned what that trick is.

While there maybe some other ways by which the current system, GPS might still be tricked, what’s important here is the fact the Foursquare is very clear that awarding of badges and mayorship titles are done as truthfully and efficiently possible. After all, Foursquare’s main purpose is to let you share places you’ve visited with your friends. I really couldn’t understand why you want to attain mayorship of a particular place even if you’ve never been to that place. And you get to tell your friends about it? That’s pretty weird, right?

In short, Foursquare is a serious social networking service so us, being Foursquare members should take it upon ourselves to use it truthfully.

Google Wants You to (Re)Confirm Buzz Privacy Settings

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True to what has been reported a couple of hours ago, Google has started asking Buzz users to confirm the new Buzz privacy settings. You’ll get the notification page the next time you click on the Buzz tab on your Gmail account.

Google also explained why they are asking Buzz members to confirm their privacy settings again. According to a post on the Official Google Blog – “we quickly realized we didn’t get everything right and moved as fast as possible to improve the Buzz experience. ”

Google has been making a number of changes since issues on privacy started to escalate such as replacing the auto-follow with suggestions for people to follow instead.  The good thing about this setup is that Buzz users are given the freedom to choose people that they will follow.

Now, this is well and good for new Buzz users after the new privacy policy was implemented. But for those who started using Google Buzz earlier, the auto-suggest may not have worked. So, Google is issuing the Google Buzz confirmation page again to ensure that old users are given a chance to change their privacy settings or accept these settings as it is.

The confimation page is the same privacy settings page given when you first activated Google Buzz. When you get it now, you are free to edit, unfollow and follow people before finally accepting it.

So, are you going to accept the new Google Buzz privacy settings? Or have you totally deactivated Google Buzz already?