After a wait of 20 days, Opera Mini has been approved by Apple for release to the App Store.

Had you bought stock in Apple Computers when the Macintosh was introduced in 1984, you’d have received quite a nice return on your investment over the past 25 years. Had you bought Apple stock in 2001, when iTunes was introduced, your nine-year ROI would look pretty stellar, too. Heck, if you’d bought some AAPL in 2007, when the iPhone came out, chances are you’d have doubled your money in three short, mostly lackluster stock market years.

But what about now? Is 2010, the year of the iPad’s introduction, time to buy or time to sell shares in the company Steve Jobs founded?

Self-described mobile industry enthusiast, author and chronicler Tomi T Ahonen is unequivocal: “[Apple’s] time of ascendancy has come to an end.”

Last week, I wrote about an upcoming bullet hell SHMUP from Cave called ESPGALUDA II due to hit the App Store last Saturday. As promised, it did, and at a special low introductory price of $4.99 to boot.

Unfortunately, though, ESPGALUDA II came with some big problems.

For one, it would only run on the iPhone 3Gs or iPad. Even worse? Due to a developer error, third generation iPod Touches like mine were inexplicably incapable of running the game, even though the hardware supports it. This put iPod Touch owners in a nasty position: they either dropped five bucks on the ESPGALUDA II app now and hoped an update came along soon to fix the install problem, or waited for the fix and risk paying an extra four bucks for the game later.

If you’re a SHMUP-loving iPod Touch 3rd Gen owner, though, don’t despair. There’s an easy way to get ESPGALUDA II running on your device right now. Just follow the instructions below.

Who knows how the iPad will ultimately be used? Certainly no one at this early date.

Is it merely an ebook reader, or is it a gaming device? Could it be an honest-to-goodness tool for business?

Like so many things, it all depends on your expectations.

It’s well known by now that early impressions of the iPad find it pooh-pooed by the technorati and generally lauded by the great unwashed as a fantastical window (if you’ll excuse the pun) into the future of mobile computing.

The highly regarded founder of Daily Kos, one of the Internet’s most widely read blogs, weighed in Sunday with a wide-ranging, detailed review of Apple’s latest creation and pronounced the iPad a gadget that “scored big as … a device that makes my life easier,” calling it “better than a laptop.”

The introduction of the iPad is a clarion call for major music labels to finally recognize the future of the music industry and embrace the development of applications made to run on Apple’s new device, according to a feature article in the latest issue of Billboard Magazine, which officially hits news stands Saturday.

Once the province of industry insiders, filled with reams of stats and reportage on music industry minutiae, behind-the-scenes comings and goings and gossip, Billboard is now a smart and snappy magazine with its finger on the pulse of the larger forces at work in the music industry, with articles seemingly targeting a more general audience while remaining the go-to source for the numbers that drive the industry.

The cover of the current issue promises a look at The Next Killer Apps, though what the article inside actually suggests is that – generally – the next killer apps on the iPad are going to be music-related offerings tied to artist branding that will give consumers something more than the aural experience provided by CDs and music downloads, and will provide the industry new realms of revenue producing products that go well beyond the marketing value of the web content and promotional aspirations of most mobile offerings produced to date.

We wrap up another week of deals with a couple hardware bargains and some price cuts on apps for the new iPad. First up is a quad-core 2.66GHz Mac Pro Tower with 8GB of RAM and a 24-inch LCD monitor for $3,499. Next is a number of iPad apps sporting lower prices, including UNO HD, a version of the addictive game for Apple’s new tablet. We wrap up our top trio with a deal on an 8GB iPod nano for $129.

Along the way, we’ll also check out some cases for your iPod touch, some email software and some speakers. As always, details on these and many other items are available at CoM’s “Daily Deals” page which starts right after the jump.

Yesterday’s announcement of the Apple Game Center was exciting news for serious iPhone OS gamers: it’s a defragmentation move by Apple to consolidate all of the many social gaming services like OpenFeint, Plus+ and others. Gamers can expect a uniform social gaming experience across all their iPhone games with features like universal friends lists, matchmaking and achievements.

There’s a lot to like here, but you’d expect the people behind the existing systems to be upset. Not so: OpenFeint and Plus+ are thrilled by Apple’s move. Why? They anticipated it, and have been moving their networks in the direction of supporting the freemium model of selling virtual goods in ostensibly free games as a way to profit.

The iPhone’s stripped down version of Safari lacks many of the features of its more well-endowed OSX brother — for instance, Mobile Safari won’t do tabs, or let users make in-page word searches. And iPad’s Mobile Safari won’t perform those tricks either.

A couple of months ago, we reviewed Vais Salikhov’s Find In Page, a $1 app that patched the latter hole, making in page searches possible on the iPhone. Version 2.0 was just released yesterday, making it fully compatible with the iPad.

Find In Page is probably even more of a must-have item on the iPad than it is on the iPhone, since the iPad is such a surf-board that Safari will probably get used much more heavily than on the iPhone. Although, maybe a few hours worth of patience are in order here — it’s entirely possible the tweaks revealed within the next few hours or so might contain this same little fix.

He may be homo sapiens‘ answer to a hipster Droopy, but after Steve Jobs, Justin Long is the avatar of the Apple experience thanks to the popular series of “Get a Mac” ads. Now he tells the Onion AV Club that the campaign might be through.

Although Apple said it sold 300,000 iPads just on April 3, that figure has more than doubled as of Thursday morning. More than 600,000 iPads have gone online, according to a running tally begun earlier this week by advertising network Chitka.

California, unsurprisingly, has the most dense iPad per population ratio in the country, with one tablet device per 1,441 citizens of the West Coast state. At the other end of the spectrum is Wyoming with one iPad per 8,247 citizens of the big sky state.