Sparrow is a elegantly designed app that shows great potential to replace the built-in Mail app in Mac OS X.

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Apple released a new ad showcasing some of the featured iPad apps currently available in the Apps Store – Djay, American Airlines’ iPad app, The Wall Street Journal, iBook app and Vanity Fair with Marylyn Monroe on the cover. The new TV ad is also to highlight that Apple now has more than 60,000 iPad apps on the App Store. See the ad here in Youtube or other iPad ads at apple.com.

Let’s put things into perspective. If you sat down and counted from 1 to 1 billion, you would take about 95 years to complete. And if you were to find a fishbowl big enough to fit 1 billion goldfishes, you would need a stadium to fit them all. Now double that.

Apple announced last Monday that the app store has surpassed 2 billion downloads from 50 million iPhone and iPod Touch users worldwide. That’s an average of 40 apps per device and according to Steve Jobs, half a billion was downloaded in this quarter alone. The calculators here in iHeartApple don’t have enough room to display enough zeros, so while we buy new ones, AppleInsider has kindly done all the maths for us. In the last 80 days alone, 6.3 million apps were downloaded per day, up from 4.1 million per day in the first 365 days of the app store launch.

That’s a staggering amount considering Singapore’s population barely tipped 4.99 million, as of June 2009.

What does this all mean for us? Well, I think a mobile device is only as useful as what it can do for you. With 85,000 apps to choose from, your iPhone and iPod Touch will give you far better mileage than other mobile devices currently in the market, all packed in a sleek and intuitive user interface Apple is famous for.

This 2 billion downloads is only the beginning. With numbers like this, Apple’s app store is by far the best solution for developers who are looking for a robust distribution infrastructure and this only means we will soon see more and more apps come through as software makers choose this app store over others.

So if you already own an iPhone or iPod Touch, I think we’re on the right boat with this one. If not, you can pick up a new iPod Touch from Apple SG Store and an iPhone from SingTel.

Bringing copying to a new low level.

Brought to our attention by a reader, we bring you Classics: Jane Austen by Diego Dominguez Ferrera of Ubiklabs. The application is a collection of ebooks by Jane Austen bundled together in a $2.99 package. Look familiar? It should, as the visual styling is very similar to Classics as seen in these two screenshots …

Read more at The Infinity Loop

The Mac Daddies at Ecamm Network has a good tip for iPhone app developers with regards to their earnings: If you have not done so, go fill in a 12 page Japanese tax exemption form as the Japanese tax authorities will withhold 20% of your earnings unless the forms are received.

They discovered about this after constantly finding around 20% of their earnings missing from sales of their app in the Japanese App Store. When they wrote to Apple, this was what they received:

“There is a 20% withholding tax in Japan until the Japanese tax authorities have accepted your tax exemption forms. This can take 90 days or longer. … They were required at the contract setup time in iTunes Connect. If you haven’t completed these and sent them in, you must or you should not have been paid.”

So for Singaporean iPhone developers out there, do spend some time during this Chinese New Year break and fill up all these tax forms to get all your income. (via Daring Fireball)

MacBook Pro 17-inch battery replacement plan

One item from Philnote which I didn’t touch much on was the announcement of the new unibody 17-inch MacBook Pro that comes with the new in-built battery that Apple claims can run up to 8 hours and takes 1,000 charges. With it shipping only after 4 to 6 weeks, we still won’t know how much mileage Apple’s claim goes.

But they have announced the cost of replacing the battery should it fail. AT US$179 (pre taxes), which comes up to something between S$270-S$300 for the battery to be replaced. So just hope those “claims” are somewhat close, or it will be expensive to replace them.

New Google Quick Search Box

If you are a QuickSilver user on the Mac, you will be familiar with Google’s new Quick Search Box. Quicksilver allows you to search, launch applications and many other functions via a few quick key-presses, all within a small window that pops up when you activate it. Quick Search Box, now currently at beta, works similarly. Hit a key combi and a small window pops up over all other window on your Desktop and you can key in search terms to look for items on the web, or applications on your Mac.

The similarities are not surprising as Nicholas Jitkoff, of QuickSilver fame, is part of the team behind this new project from Google Code. As it is still in beta, do try it at your own risk and help develop it by contributing to the app’s Discussion Group. Download here

3rd Party web browsers available in App Store

Weeks back we constantly read reports about Apple dismissing applications for iPhone apps that replicate apps made by Apple, eg Podcaster, Opera web browser.

But just the past week, new web browsers appeared in the App Store – Incognito, Edge Browser, WebMate and QuickSurf – each appeared to provide web surfing functions like Safari.

Besides the basic web surfing, some apps attempted to differentiate themselves with features not available in Safari, with less hits than misses. For example, to key in the URL for Edge Browser, you’d need to exit the app, go to the Settings section to fill the URL, just to get full screen browsing. Or Hot Browser comes with a “shake” the iPhone to get a randomly hot site.

There will definitely be more such browser apps coming up but if it ain’t free, I don’t see any reasons to switch from Safari.