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5 ways to save money with your iPhone or Android smartphone

Even before Apple and Google dominated the mobile software industry, money-saving apps were must-haves for power users of previous generation mobile environments like the Palm OS.

Much of these legacy software, lacking the internet access and tight hardware integration that define the smartphone experience today, were limited to helping users balance their budgets.

That’s definitely changed, especially as the average smartphone buyer places more weight on what apps are available for a phone, with less focus on the gadget’s built-in hardware features. [Read more…]

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Apple Approves Opera Mini for iPhone

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…]

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

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?

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Dropbox App Coming Soon to Android Phones

Among the cloud storage services I’ve tried, I stuck with Dropbox for its superb storage solution. I used Dropbox to synchronize my files from my online, desktop and iPhone applications and pretty soon I might get another interface – for my Android-powered Google Nexus One phone.

Yes, you read it right. If you have a Dropbox account, you will soon be able to access your files from your Android phone as Dropbox is about to launch its new Android app pretty soon. And will the upcoming Dropbox app for Android offer us Android phone owners?

The new Dropbox iPhone app will let you:

Access your Dropbox on the go – view all the contents of your Dropbox account, including music and movie streaming right on your Android phone.

Make edits to your files and sync them back to Dropbox – Changes you make to your files using the Android app will be automatically synced to your Dropbox account/

Download files for offline viewing – Have all your files accessible anytime, anywhere by adding them to your “Favorites.’

Upload files and sync them to your Dropbox – Use your Android phone’s powerful camera to take snapshots, shoot video and then upload them from your Android phones to your Dropbox account to make them accessible. You can also send an email containing the links to your files to your friends quickly and easily.

Share links to files in your Dropbox –  That practically include any  files in your computer.

No words yet on the exact date that this Android app will be available, although the Dropbox blog mentioned something like in the next few months.

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Vlingo iPhone App Adds Voice Command for SMS and Email Messaging

While voice search and voice-to-text have  been default features  of Google’s Nexus One, Vlingo which pioneered voice control app for the BlackBerry last year believes that this technology can be extended to email messaging. As such, Vlingo has updated it’s iPhone app by adding the ability to send e-mail and SMS messages using voice commands.

Vlingo is offering these two new features as in-app upgrades which you can choose to get by paying $6.99 for each feature or $9.99 for both. This may seem a pretty fair deal for email messaging but not for SMS especially if you’ve use the Nexus One’s free voice-to-text app.

While I have no plans of getting Vlingo with these features for my iPhone, Mashable’s Christina Warren notes that the app’s voice-activated web search lets you select your default search engine although you can still use other search engine if you wish to.

She also noticed that voice recognition is pretty good as well. Hopefully better than the Nexus One’s poor voice recognition feature. Now, I’m beginning to get interested with this app. You know what, I think I will get this as soon as I’ve checked if my iPhone still has some room for another app.

In addition to this, Vlingo has also updated its iPhone app’s interface by making it more streamlined and easier to select what options you want to use.

I’m currently downloading Vlingo (iTunes Link)  from the Apps Store right now. Will update this post as soon as I test out these features.

Update: Alright, I agree, Vlingo’s voice recognition is pretty good. It was able to recognize what I said the first time I tried it. Yes, it’s better than the Nexus One’s voice recognition feature. I’m getting the paid features now.