Good news for Opera (and its legions of fans around the world): the company has just announced that its mobile browser Opera Mini has been approved for iPhone and iPod touch on the App Store.
The app will be available as a free download within 24 hours, depending on which market you are located in.
The iPhone app was shown off by the Norwegian software company to a small circle of reporters at the most recent Mobile World Congress (us included).
Opera then officially submitted Opera Mini for iPhone to the Apple App Store on March 23, when we wondered out loud if it would ever be approved.
The answer to that question is yes, contrary to what many believed would happen. I guess they can take that counter down now.
Opera Software claims Opera Mini for iPhone is up to 6 times faster than the native browser thanks to its compression and server-side rendering technology, based on internal tests, and after having tried it at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona myself I have to say it’s definitely zooming.
When the app was first submitted to Apple for approval, Opera told me that they hadd analyzed the App Store policies in great detail, and that they were completely certain of being 100% compliant – looks like they were right.
Earlier today, Opera disclosed that it now counts over 100 million users, about half of which are using its mobile browser products. The company also offers Opera Mini 5 beta for Android phones.
Twitter has just announced that it acquired Tweetie, the very popular and highly polished Twitter application for the iPhone . The application will now be called “Twitter for iPhone” and will drop from $2.99 to free, with developer Loren Brichter (who makes up the one-man startup Atebits) joining the Twitter mobile team. Twitter also plans to launch Twitter for the iPad, which Brichter will be involved with.
It’s a move that manages to be both jarring and unsurprising at the same time. Unsurprising, because Twitter investor Fred Wilson recently wrote that Twitter developers needed to stop “filling holes” in Twitter’s product and instead build entirely separate businesses. And just this morning, Twitter launched an official Twitter for BlackBerry application, so another mobile application shouldn’t come as much of a shock. And yet, the iPhone is a platform where Twitter has a very strong third party presence, and Twitter has no doubt been benefiting from the contributions of these developers. Tweetie is extremely polished and is arguably the best, but there are plenty of other quality applications that are getting hung out to dry. Still, a move like this seemed inevitable.
In a blog post announcing the news, Twitter CEO Evan Williams explains the logic: people are going to iTunes, searching for a Twitter application, and not finding one so they give up (this sounds like a problem with iTunes search, but perhaps people really just want to see ‘Twitter’ in the application’s title):
Careful analysis of the Twitter user experience in the iTunes AppStore revealed massive room for improvement. People are looking for an app from Twitter, and they’re not finding one. So, they get confused and give up. It’s important that we optimize for user benefit and create an awesome experience.
This all comes less than a week before Twitter’s developer conference, Chirp, where I suspect the company will try to steer developers down a path that they won’t be paving over any time soon.
Of note: Twitter’s post does not mention anything about the Tweetie desktop application, which is available exclusively for the Mac. Don’t be surprised if this becomes ‘Twitter For Mac’ eventually.
Here’s a phrase many of you will remember, probably from the late 1990s: “Yeah, I’d get a cell phone, but I don’t want to be on, like, an electronic leash, you know?” People had land lines, pagers, car phones — the pocketable mobile phone was still a luxury and, to some, an unwanted responsibility. Over the next 10 years or so, the mobile phone gradually reached such high levels of market penetration that it’s quite difficult to find anybody without one. It is simply too practical and affordable to refrain from at this point. However, in the last few years, as smartphones and texting have become the default mode of communication for many people, the tone has changed again; the electronic leash is returning.
Why is this? It’s actually pretty simple: once a tool reaches a certain level of integration with the social and communication norms of a person, it receives the same level of cognitive consideration as, say, speech. Do you wonder whether you should end a text message with an exclamation mark, a period, or nothing at all? This is because texting and email are approaching the same level of integration with our daily lives as the speech and gestures we’ve been using for millennia.
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Mobile entertainment startup mSpot is extending its Mobile Movies site, which will let users stream full-length movies on their mobile phones, on the web, so you can enjoy mSpot’s online streaming movie service on your computer.
mSpot has struck deals with Paramount, Universal, Image Entertainment, and Screen Media Ventures to stream full-length movie rentals to users’ PCs and cell phones, allowing you to switch between both devices as you pick up and leave off throughout a movie. The PC streaming functionality builds upon the mobile movie service mSpot launched last year. The service includes 1000 titles that can be streamed to both a computer and mobile device.
The service works on over 50 different handset devices – including the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm, Android, Windows Mobile and others. Users can stream individual movies for $4.99 each or join a monthly Movie Club: $9.99/month for up to 4 movies, $12.99 for 6 movies, or $15.99 for 8 movies.
Of course, mSpot’s main competition is Apple, which lets Mac, iPhone and iPod touch users, download and sync movies and shows onto all of their devices via an AppleTV. But mSpot And mSpot will face other series competition from Netflix, when the company eventually moves into the mobile space.
