Hoiio Blog

The disaster in Japan is a humanitarian problem that we all have to face together. To play our part to face this crisis, we are reducing our SMS rate to Japan.

We also reduce our call rate to Japan  by around 30% for our users in Singapore and Hongkong.

Though it’s not that much, we hope that this will help you to contact your friends and families who might be affected by the disaster. If you think that there’s more we can do, please contact us at support@hoiio.com.

You can find complete information regarding the Japan earthquake and resources for those in need at Google’s Crisis Response page in English and Japanese.

Our plan is to push new features and bug fixes to the market as fast as possible. That means our app will be updated quite regularly. Therefore, make sure that you download the latest app from the app store.

What’s New

1. Free SMS Invitations for your friends

To reap the benefits of Hoiio Chat, you need to ask your friends to download the app. You can share Hoiio Chat through Facebook, Twitter and text messages. However, we realise that sending text messages in some countries can be expensive. Therefore, we are are providing 30 free text messages to invite your friends to download Hoiio Chat.

Let’s start to invite your friends and families overseas to use Hoiio Chat.

2. Updates on Group Activities

Okay, Tarzan has changed his group chat nickname to BigHead. Clark has left the group and Parker has joined the group. Sounds confusing? No worries, we’ll write these down for you.

3. Repair Contacts

We’ve heard some feedback from our users that they can’t see their friends who have downloaded the app in the Hoiio Chat contact list. This happens because your phone’s regional setting and the mobile number you use to register are not the same.

If this issue happens to you, just click the Repair Contacts button in Settings.

And many bug fixes.

Update  your Hoiio Chat from App Store now.

We admired Apple for the groundbreaking products and concepts they introduced in the past few years. For mobile app developers like us, Apple has helped push mobile data (GPRS) charges down and make mobile app delivery easy.

Maybe you can remember pre-iPhone era when:

• Mobile sites that we accessed from our mobile phones were dominated by WAP pages
• Data (GPRS) charge to access those sites was still very expensive
• Downloading Java apps to our phone must be done via Bluetooth or computer cable

Yes, that was how we started to develop Hoiio mobile app in 2007. It was about creating an app on J2ME, making the app size as small as possible and delivering the app via SMS download or Bluetooth.

Thanks to Apple iPhone that has forced mobile operators to lower their mobile data charges and Apple App Store concept that has simplified app delivery process.

Apple’s latest product, iPad,  has been released and we really want to get our hands on one. As it is not currently sold in Singapore, we have to order the iPad online from Apple US site and have it shipped to Singapore. As we were placing the order, we were thinking to share the joy of owning an iPad with our users.  We ordered not one, but three extra iPads, yay! (we can save on shipping cost too)

We are not sure to whom should we give the 1st iPad to. Therefore, we started a competition to give an equal chance for you to win it. Go to ipad.hoiio.com for more information and watch out for more great news on winning more iPads!