Daily Bits

Mobile

iPad and iBooks Will Eventually Kill the Kindle

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You don’t need to get your hands-on the iPad to realize that it has the potential to kill the Kindle unless Amazon does something drastic to make its  boring gray, e-ink display into something colorful. The iPad supports full color display and the iBooks app for the iPad will transform your  e-ebook reading experience into something colorful albeit a fun one.

I mean, just take a look at the sample screenshots of an e-book being rendered on the iPad using the iBooks apps. Rich, colorful graphics that accompanies e-books, be it children’s books, fiction, sci-fi or business-related, it will surely be more pleasant and appealing to read e-books on the iPad than it is on the Kindle.  And don’t even get me started on the issue of readability and eye strain due to prolong use. You can always shut off your iPad and rest your eyes a bit if you think that your eyes are already strained. So, it’s not really a negative point of the iPad that it’s display was said to be not mean for prolong reading pleasures.

And for the iBookstore, I’m pretty sure electronic publishers will dive into the iPad wave pretty soon if they haven’t started doing so, yet.  You don’t even have to worry if not too many publishers will not support the iPad.  The Project Guttenberg with its thousands of public domain books will provide you with your e-book fix.

What Apple needs to do to complete its e-book market domination and successfully steal the thunder from Amazon is to make the iBookstore available outside the U.S. Especially as soon as Apple starts marketing the iPad to the international markets.

TweetDeck App Fully Optimized for the iPad

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With the large screen real-estate that the iPad offers, I wasn’t really quite surprised that the first adopters among application developers would be those with mobile Twitter client apps. If you checked the iTunes iPad App Store right now, you’d find several Twitter apps for the iPad – both new and old ones ported to the new platform. One of these Twitter apps which happens to be also my favorite on mobile phones is TweetDeck.

Thankfully, the TweetDeck folks didn’t just ported their mobile TweetDeck app to the iPad platform but build a new application instead. In fact they’ve build two new interfaces – for portrait and landscape modes. TweetDeck for iPad also takes full use of the device’s multi-gesture features.

Feature-wise, TweetDeck for iPad lets you do practically everything that you can with its mobile phone versions. The app lets you fully manage all your Twitter accounts, check web pages from within TweetDeck, use columns to manage your real-time feed, sync your data with the desktop and iphone client, iPad gesture based navigation, geolocation data and map interface, and of course all the basic Twitter functions such as composing tweets, retweeting and sending DMs.

And guess what? TweetDeck for iPad is a free download. Get it from the iTunes iPad App Store once you received your iPad.

Or watch this video showing the TweetDeck for iPad in action.

LinkedIn Releases Mobile App for BlackBerry Devices

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LinkedIn expands it services further with the release of  its new mobile applications for all BlackBerry  devices including Tour, Curve and Bold models running OS v4.3 or later. The new LinkedIn for BlackBerry is a handy application that will be most useful for looking up professionals worldwide, in real-time.

The LinkedIn for BlackBerry gives you a full, rich feature set designed to bring the most useful features of LinkedIn to your BlackBerry devices. It has six modules:

  • Network Updates – for viewing and sharing crucial business intelligence and updates.
  • Search – for searching across 60 million global professionals, and get the answer back in seconds through a  unified search across both your direct connections and the entire LinkedIn network.
  • Connections – for getting  quick access to any of your connections to get their up-to-date profile information, and the ability to send them a message immediately.
  • Invitations – for accepting outstanding invitations immediately.
  • Messages – for integrated access to BBM and LinkedIn messages.
  • Reconnect – for bringing suggestions for new connections.

Of course, it’s major purpose is for quickly viewing LinkedIn profiles right on your BlackBerry devices, anytime, anywhere.  In the business setting, you can get an upper hand during board meetings  if you know some personal details about the people you will be negotiating with, prior to the meeting proper.

LinkedIn for BlackBerry is available now as a free download here. It will soon be available in the BlackBerryApp World as well.

WordPress for iPhone 2.3 Now Supports Geotagging for WordPress.com Blogs

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WordPress has just released version 2.3 of its mobile application for iPhone. Biggest new feature is geotagging support for WordPress.com hosted blogs via a very intuitive interface. This means that you can now add geographic location to each and every post that you are going to publish on your WordPress.com blog.

Unfortunately for self-hosted WordPress blog, the feature is not activated yet. But you can still geotag your posts and it will be saved, possibly for display later on when a plugin to provide geotagging display is enabled for self-hosted WordPress blogs.

In addition to geotagging feature, the new WordPress for iPhone app also comes with a couple of improvements on user interface.  The bug on “more” tag was fixed and it now allows you to load more posts and pages in excess of the default number  of posts allowed as specified in your blog settings.

Incidentally, the WordPress for iPhone folks are excited to report that in only months since they have released the app, it now has 250,000 download, up from the mere 20,000 downloads it got in November 2009. Quite an achievement indeed, although if only all of the WordPress.com bloggers have their iPhone and iPod Touch and will do mobile blogging, then that number would shoot up some more.

Anyway, the new WordPress for iPhone app version 2.3 was supposed to be available here. But I have no luck in finding it from both my country’s Apps Store nor at the U.S. App Store. Did you get it?

Skype Mobile for Verizon Goes Out on Thursday

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If you’re a Verizon Wireless customer using a smartphone under any Verizon data plan, you’d be glad to know that come Thursday, Skype Mobile will be available for download to your Verizon phones.  Of course, if you’ve been using Skype since ages ago, you’d know that this mobile app will allow you to get in touch with friends, family and colleagues all over the world.

Skype Mobile will let you make and receive unlimited Skype-to-Skype voice calls to practically anyone else who are also using Skype.  It will also let you send and receive unlimited instant messages with other Skype users, and call international phone numbers at cheap rates.

So, if you’ve got any of the following Verizon smartphones:

  • BlackBerry Storm 9530,
  • Storm2 9550,
  • Curve 8330, Curve 8530,
  • 8830 World Edition
  • Tour 9630 smartphones,
  • DROID by Motorola
  • DROID ERIS by HTC
  • Motorola DEVOUR

then prepare your smartphones now to download Skype Mobile on Thursday.

Skype Mobile works on Verizon Wireless’ voice network for wireless connection during Skype-to-Skype calls.  When making international calls, Skype Credits are required. But for domestic Skype-to-Skype calls are free of charge and will not affect your monthly minute allowance and data plan.

To get the download link for the app, text SKYPE to 2255 on Thursday.

Digg Unloads Widget, Buttons Generator and Soon an iPhone App

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As if telling us that they are still up and running, the folks at Digg has been sending out noisemakers one after another.  Digg has just released the buttons and widget generators while a native iPhone app is in the pipeline.

The New Digg iPhone Application

The new Digg native iPhone app is not yet announced but Mashable was able to obtain some insider info as well as screenshots to prove that the Digg iPhone app is indeed in the works.  The app would support browsing of popular, upcoming and recent stories across all topics in Digg.com. It will also let you Digg and bury stories right within the app. Plus an option to navigate through comments and related stories. The Digg iPhone app is slated for release anytime now in the Apps Store.

Digg Buttons and Widget Generators

The new Digg buttons and widget generators on the other are now both available. What these online tools allow you to do is to create and customize Digg buttons that you can incorporate to your blogs/sites seamlessly.  Digg is releasing these online tools in preparation for the launch of the redesigned Digg.

But aside from letting you create Digg buttons easily, the buttons that you will create and incorporate in your websites now boasts of  new features such as dynamic display of live Digg count, faster load time, customizable look and feel and more.

The Digg widgets also gets some other new features including more customization options, tabs and columns, thumbnails, fallback content and more.

You can try creating your Digg buttons here, or the Digg Widgets here.