Daily Bits

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?

5 Cool iPad Games that I’m Dying to Play

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Reports had it there are already more than 3,000 apps available on the iPad Apps Store. Most of these apps are probably games ported from the iPhone to the iPad. Since I’m won’t be receiving my iPad until a couple of days more, I’ve scoured the iPad App Store looking for games that I will most likely play on my iPad. Look what I’ve found? Old iPhone favorites making their way to the iPad. I’ve got five of them listed.

Glyder 2 for iPad

I loved this game when I played it on my iPhone. The game environment is beautifully rendered, the animation was flawless and the graphics is definitely colorful. Can you just imagine how great it will look on a 10-inch HD display of the iPad? The game’s exclusive features for the iPad include – enhanced graphics, multiple controls, enhanced navigation, 3D world viewer and Facebook connectivity. (Price: $4.99) iTunes link. [Read more…] about 5 Cool iPad Games that I’m Dying to Play

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.