Opera Software is partnering with mobile payment and analytics firm Bango to introduce new purchase and billing options within its Opera Mobile Store. Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browser users may now buy apps and premium in-app content from the store and then charge the transaction to their credit card or monthly carrier bill.

Opera Mobile Store (built in association with white-label storefront solutions provider Appia) touts apps and content targeted to each consumer’s specific mobile device, local market and currency. The storefront spans more than 200 countries and every mobile platform, offering both premium and free applications. Although the store is a featured Speed Dial link on the Opera Mini and Opera Mobile browsers, it is also accessible across devices running non-Opera browsers. Developers earn 70 percent of net revenues generated via the Opera Mobile Store.

Close to 122 million mobile subscribers worldwide accessed Opera Mini in July 2011, browsing more than 74.0 billion pages. Earlier this month, Opera Software introduced Oupeng, a new browser developed for the enormous Chinese market. In addition to leveraging Opera’s signature data compression technology, which increases page loading speeds by up to 10 times while reducing data consumption as much as 90 percent, Oupeng embeds support for Weibo, one of China’s premier microblogging services, enabling users to share content, post updates and view photos.

Samsung unveiled ChatON, a free mobile messaging service enabling users to communicate across all major smartphone and feature phone platforms.

Similar in concept to the very popular BBM by Research In Motion’s, ChatON enables users to share text communications, photos, video clips and hand-written notes; the service includes support for group messaging and also features a web client to enable conversations between mobile and PC users. Alongside the basic ChatON service optimized for feature phones, Samsung will offer a feature-rich version for smartphones including interaction rankings, animated messages and a “Trunk” for automatic content sharing.

Samsung will launch ChatON next month in more than 120 countries, with support for up to 62 languages. It also plans expand the solution beyond mobile phones to connected devices like tablets and netbooks.

ChatON is the latest entry in the increasingly competitive mobile messaging space. Apple’s  much-anticipated iOS 5 operating system overhaul brings with it iMessage, which lets consumers send free text messages, photos and videos among all iOS devices. Facebook Messenger, a free, standalone application introduced earlier this month, enables iOS and Android device users to correspond directly with their Facebook friends. And just last week, Skype acquired group messaging solutions startup GroupMe, whose application enables users to text and make conference calls with circles of friends or colleagues across multiple operating systems.

So we can say that the battle is really heating up in the mobile chat space with handsets up against cross platform guys like Facebook and Skype.

Lady Gaga (right) has her own headphones range called Heartbeats

Dr. Dre is selling just over half of his audio company Beats Electronics to smartphone maker HTC.

It is buying a 51% stake in the rapper’s company for $309 million (£190m).

Beats Electronics makes headphones and speakers and was set up by Dr. Dre and music producer Jimmy Iovine.

The purchase will be HTC’s fifth acquisition this year, as the company fights to increase share against rivals Apple and Samsung.

The Taiwanese firm said it expected the deal to close in the next few months and to have a number of products that incorporate Beats technology on the market by the end of the year.

Jimmy Iovine, chairman and founder of Beats Electronics, will continue to run the company.

He is also chairman of Interscope Records, which produces albums for the likes of Black Eyed Peas and All Time Low, and a mentor on American Idol.

Dr. Dre founded Beats Electronics in 2006 with the company’s headphones costing as much as $600 (£368).

Huawei is to launch its first own-branded Android handset in the UK, pledging to build its brand in the market and take on rival Android vendors. Bloomberg reports that the Chinese vendor could launch its Blaze device (pictured) in the UK as early as next month and is expected to position it at the lower-end of the smartphone market, possibly costing just £100. “We’re trying to establish the brand, almost from scratch,” said Mark Mitchinson, the company’s UK executive VP, who has previously worked for both Samsung and Nokia. He said Huawei will compete with “anyone involved in Android.” Huawei is targeting a UK market share of 4 percent to 5 percent.

TechCrunch said that a number of developers selling products via Google’s Android Market are claiming that the payments they receive do not match-up with the number of apps they have sold. According to the report, the issue is related to transactions made via the Android Market web store, rather than to products purchased directly from Android handsets. It was suggested that these transactions are being processed via Google Checkout, without developers receiving their share of the income.

TechCrunch said that Google has made an official response, and that once an official fix has been put in place, developers will be notified if they are due more cash and the next payment will rectify this. It was also said that the company argues it has been proactive in keeping developers up-to-date with its progress.

Apparently Apple isn’t the only company running an App Store with a penchant for secrecy.

In a blog post this morning, mobile developer Shifty Jelly has publicly called out Amazon for covertly offering the company featured placement on its unofficial Android Appstore as the ‘free app of the day’. This is a well-known promotion that Amazon has openly talked about, but there’s a twist: instead of paying developers 20% of the app’s List Price, which is what it had previously promised, Amazon is asking them to take a 0% rev share. If that’s confusing, read on.

The post, titled ‘Amazon App Store: Rotten to the Core’, recounts how Amazon approached Shifty Jelly with the following secret offer (emphasis Amazon’s):

As you may already know, the Free App of the Day offer placement is one of the most visible and valuable spaces on the Amazon Appstore. We would like to include your app “[name removed]” in our Free App of the Day calendar. We have seen tremendous results from this promotion spot and believe it will bring you a great deal of positive reviews and traffic. It is an opportunity to build your brand especially in association with a brand like Amazon’s. The current price of this placement is at 0% rev share for that one day you are placed.

Now, I vividly remember quizzing the people in charge of Amazon’s Appstore back when it first launched in January. I asked multiple times how exactly their free app of the day promotions would work. And I was very clearly told that even if Amazon decided to make an app free, developers would still be making 20% of their list price. In other words, they’d still make money. So much for that idea.

After extended internal debate, Shifty Jelly agreed to Amazon’s offer — they’d give away their appPocket Casts for free for one day.

The results? They ‘sold’ 100,000 copies, for which they received nothing, and the sustained promotion they were promised was unimpressive: “the day after saw a blip in sales, followed by things going back to exactly where we started, selling a few apps a day.” Now Shifty Jelly has to add servers to accommodate thousands of new users and has hundreds of additional support requests, with no additional revenue to show for it.

It’s completely ridiculous that Amazon publicly talked about giving developers 20% of the List Price only to later ask them to accept a worse deal — and that they’re now “putting really restrictive clauses at the bottom of their emails, saying that no one is even allowed to discuss these back door deals they are doing.”

That said, Shifty Jelly still had to agree to the new terms before the offer launched, and it’s not as if they just gave the application away to 100,000 people who would have otherwise paid for it — their report indicates that they were only selling a handful of apps on most days.

Other developers should take note: Amazon’s promised “tremendous results” may not do much to help your bottom line. We’ve reached out to Amazon for comment.

For some background, here’s how Amazon’s pricing system works (from my previous post):

The biggest departure from the mobile app stores we’ve grown accustomed to involves pricing. Unlike Apple’s App Store and Android Market, where developers can set their price to whatever they’d like, Amazon retains full control over how it wants to price your application. The setup is a bit confusing: upon submitting your application, you can set a ‘List Price’, which is the price you’d normally sell it at. Amazon will use a variety of market factors to determine what price it wants to use, and you get a 70% cut of the proceeds of each sale (which is the industry standard). In the event that Amazon steeply discounts your application, or offers it for free, you’re guaranteed to get 20% of the List Price.

Came across this very interesting article on Techcrunch :

Malware is becoming more of a problem for Android users.
Users of Android-based mobile devices are 2.5 times more likely to have problems with malware now than they had only six months ago, according to a report from Lookout. The mobile security firm estimates that 500,000 Android users were affected by malware in the first six months of 2011, as applications infected by malware increased from 80 in January to more than 400 in June. CNET/InSecurity Complex blog