Not only is it back and fully compliant with the SDK agreement, C64 is also up to 30 per cent better than previous versions in terms of performance (battery life and smoother game play). The addition of International Soccer, International Basketball and International Tennis brings the total number of playable games up to eight, with Bruce Lee and others arriving in the 1.2 update set to arrive in mid December. C4 is available now in the app store for $6. [iTunes]

[iTunes]

Despite the communication announcing the new Optus App Store’s arrival, there’s precious little actual information about it, other than the fact that there’s over 1000 apps available now, and that you can charge the app purchase to your bill. There’s no word on whether the content for this menacing threat to App stores is universal across the different platforms or whether apps are device specific. There’s also no word as to just how much applications will cost, and what percentage Optus will take, or how developers go about getting their programs on the Optus store.

If you’re brave enough to boldly go where only Optus employees have gone before, you can access the store by clicking the App icon in Optus Zoo on your phone, or texting app to 966 (so long as you’re an Optus customer, of course).

Pizza Hut may have announced that they were going to launch their iPhone app in Australia last month, but Domino’s has gone and launched their own app, and if you can stomach the thought of eating their pizza, it looks pretty sweet.

You get full customisation of the pizza, plus the ability to track your order and know when it’s being made and when it’s en route. You can select anything from the Dominos menu, including pasta and desserts.

The app is a free download. Definitely worth checking out if you eat Domino’s pizza.

[Domino's iPhone app (iTunes link)]

Apple Announces Over 100,000 Apps Now Available on the App Store

CUPERTINO, Calif., Nov. 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today announced that developers have created over 100,000 apps for the revolutionary App Store, the largest applications store in the world. iPhone® and iPod touch® customers in 77 countries can choose from an incredible range of apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel. App Store users have downloaded well over two billion apps, continuing to make it the world’s most popular applications store.

“The App Store, now with over 100,000 applications available, is clearly a major differentiator for millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers around the world,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “The iPhone SDK created the first great platform for mobile applications and our customers are loving all of the amazing apps our developers are creating.”

“The App Store has forever changed the mobile gaming industry and continues to improve,” said Travis Boatman, vice president of Worldwide Studios, EA Mobile. “With a global reach of over 50 million iPhone and iPod touch users, the App Store has allowed us to develop high quality EA games that have been a huge success with customers.”

“With 10,000 downloads a day, worldwide customer response to our I Am T-Pain App has exceeded our wildest expectations,” said Jeff Smith, CEO of Smule. “The App Store has given us a unique opportunity to create and grow a very successful business, and we’re looking forward to an exciting future.”

Apple continues to improve search and discovery with new features including Genius for Apps, App Store Essentials selections, sub category listings and more valuable customer reviews. With the recently introduced iTunes® 9, it’s also now easier than ever to organize and sync your apps right in iTunes and they will automatically appear on your iPhone or iPod touch with the same layout.

The release of iPhone OS 3.0 this summer made over 100 new features available to iPhone and iPod touch users including Cut, Copy and Paste; MMS; landscape view for Mail, Text and Notes; stereo Bluetooth; shake to shuffle; parental controls; automatic login at Wi-Fi hot spots and Push Notifications. These new features have been incredibly popular with customers and there have already been more than two billion Push Notifications sent to apps available from the App Store. Additionally, the recently introduced In App Purchase feature for free apps means leading developers will now be able to offer customers the choice of buying content, subscriptions and digital services from directly inside their apps.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

The data shows a clear rise in ebook apps over the last few months, such that they account for a staggering number of the new apps showing up in the store. It’s true! Look at the chart! But here’s the thing: this is purely a measure of how many new apps there are, not how well they’re doing. But still, why such a huge uptick? Let’s do a little experiment.

Pick your favourite public domain book. No, scratch that, pick your least favourite public domain book — something you had to read back in your first year of uni, and that you immediately and angrily sold back to the campus bookstore. Now, search for it in the App Store. Here’s our answer:

Treasure Island, a free, public domain book, is available for purchase as a standalone app from over a dozen different developers, in all kinds of containers, at all kinds of prices. And why not! The content is free, so once the developer has designed an ebook app container, he or she can just CTRL+Z any public domain e-text in there and throw it into the App Store. I have no idea if these things sell, but to be honest, they wouldn’t have to do very well to make money for their developers — the investment is minimal.

Even more to the point, if the iPhone really starts to pose a threat to traditional ereaders, it won’t be evident in stats like this — it’ll be through increased book downloads in all-in-one ereader apps, like Amazon’s Kindle, B&N’s Reader and unaffiliated apps like eReader and Stanza. That’s a real possibility, but for now, we should call this rapid explosion of redundant, overpriced, exploitative apps like we see it. [GigaOm]

In a blog post from May, Carmack says he loves that players port Doom to every device imaginable, but he’s disappointed that there’s rarely any real effort to build a new, functional control scheme on platforms without a keyboard and mouse. In other words, he’d rather that instead of everyone stopping at “Does it run Doom?” they ask “Does it play Doom?”

That’s why he personally developed the controls for the iPhone version, and according to early reviews, the iPhone can now play Doom. Users are saying controls as good as you would expect from Carmack. Not to mention the other enhancements like 24-bit lighting.

Sure, you might have put the game on your jailbroken iPhone years ago, but graphical upgrades and tighter controls might make it worth the $US6.99 admission price. [Recombu]

The Nokia Ovi App Store must really want to sell some Hannah Montana screensavers based on this parody video. Or maybe it’s more brainwashing than parody, because I kinda want one now. [Vimeo via The Really Mobile Project]

WolframAlpha folks are billing this as a half-priced graphic calculator, with that added benefit that it plugs into the existing WolframAlpha search engine, but again I keep coming back to the fact that I can point my browser at that web site and it costs me substantially less than $US50 to do so.

Said WolframAlpha rep Josh Dilworth in an email to Gizmodo today, “How many people will buy it? We’re not sure, but looking at the other apps that are $US50+, we think that we’re of at least comparable in utility and functionality, if not more. And, part of what the company is also doing is making a statement about the non-trivial nature of WolframAlpha’s capabilities, and how much the system has matured since launch.”

What better way to show maturity than peg your inaugural App Store app with one of the higher price tags in the whole system. Amiright?