The Philippine Online Chronicles

Another work week starts tomorrow, but before that, here are some more tech headlines from this weekend.

Mozilla recently started notifying Firefox users of the availability of the browser’s latest version, 3.6, which was launched way back in January. Mozilla says the new version has been downloaded over 100 million times already, excluding current users who upgraded using the browser’s built-in updater. Firefox has over 350 million average users daily, though, so there’s still a long way to go before they get everyone up-to-date on the latest and greatest version. They have historically shown that they can do that, however, with Firefox having a very high upgrade rate.

Moving on now, it seems that we get more Apple news even on weekends. The company has announced the details of its battery-replacement service for the iPad, and it is quite a shocker. Apple says they will ship a new iPad to users who opt for the service instead of just replacing the old one’s battery. The service will cost USD99 plus shipping and handling. I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not because although you get a new iPad, all of your personal data will not be retained. That is, unless you sync your iPad before sending it out, and then sync your data with the new one that Apple ships to you.

On even more Apple news, Opera says Opera Mini 5 will soon be available for the iPhone. The company says its latest mobile browser will appear on the iTunes App Store in a few weeks. It has all the same features as Opera Mini 5 for other mobile OSes, but it doesn’t support multi-touch, so no pinch-to-zoom here. Still. It at least will offer users an alternative to Mobile Safari.

In other news, we’ve got Lego master Nathan Sawaya’s latest creation. It’s a five-foot-tall BlackBerry Tour with a working screen! Sawaya’s latest plastic brick masterpiece will be on display at the BlackBerry Developer Conference. Speaking of BlackBerry, even more pictures of the rumored BlackBerry Slider surfaced yesterday. This time, it shows the sides of the as-yet-unnamed and unannounced phone. I wonder when RIM will get around to announcing this.

Know anyone who’s blind or vision-impaired? You might want to check this next item out. Switched has a compilation of great concepts for gadgets for those who are visually-impaired. There are phones, cameras, and even e-book readers. As I said earlier though, all of the gadgets on the list are still just concepts, but let’s hope they somehow get into production so the visually-impaired among us can enjoy technology just like the rest of us.

Finally, there’s a great look into people’s social media behavior over at Ars Technica. They say that according to a recent Barracuda Labs report, most Twitter users just lurk in the shadows. Almost one-third of all registered users have never even sent a single tweet! There are other fun facts in the story, the most important of which says that social media has not replaced real-life interaction yet. Hopefully, it will always stay that way.

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Image licensed under Wikicommons

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