Electronic Arts has just entered into a five-year strategic relationship with Facebook. Under the agreement, Facebook Credits will become the exclusive payment method for EA games on Facebook.

EA is undoubtedly feeling some heat from Zynga, the ever-growing startup that is reportedly now more valuable than EA.

EA acquired Playfish last year for a reported $400 million but has only just started to really embrace Facebook as a gaming platform. Thus far, EA has successfully ported its Madden and FIFA franchises to Facebook with Madden NFL Superstars and FIFA Superstars.

EA is also looking to bring its large catalog of successful gaming brands to the world’s largest social network, including Monopoly.

In addition, the gaming company is beta-testing its Pogo Games for Facebook app. This app will let players access approximately 20 games from one location, including Scrabble (in the U.S. and Canada), Boggle and Poppit!. This is where we think EA will have the most success. Pogo has a pretty big arsenal of addictive puzzle and board games that could prove quite popular on Facebook.

Having stronger integration with Facebook — which the agreement to utilize Facebook Credits certainly reinforces — will go a long way toward making EA a bigger name in social gaming.

Is Apple doing enough to reach Chinese customers? Not even close, if you ask Lenovo. According to The Financial Times, Lenovo’s founder Liu Chuanzhi said his company is “lucky that Steve Jobs has such a bad temper and doesn’t care about China. If Apple were to spend the same effort on the Chinese consumer as we do, we would be in trouble.”

It’s a bit odd for a company chairman to speak about competition in that way, and a Lenovo spokesman later said the remarks were uttered during a “relaxed” moment during a dinner interview. But is Chuanzhi right?

It’s true that it took several years for the iPhone to finally reach China (although the phone is actually manufactured there) and that Apple only has a handful of stores in China (the first was opened only recently, in 2008). Furthermore, a lot of what Apple has to offer lies within its brand, and Chinese customers are all about value which – compared with the price of its products – is not one of Apple’s strengths.

Still, when your competitors claim you’re missing an opportunity to take away a piece of the market from them, it might be time to do something about it. Apple didn’t provide a direct answer, instead pointing out it’s opening a new store in Shanghai, with plans to have 25 retail outlets in the country by the end of next year. Slowly but surely, Apple is extending its reach in Asia; in its Q2 2010 financial report, Apple announced a 184% year-over-year revenue increase from the Asia Pacific region. If Apple’s revenues in Asia keep on growing that way, the folks at Lenovo might one day yearn for the days of Apple’s “neglect” of China.

One of the biggest stories of 2009 has been the oft-rumored but never actually confirmed Apple tablet. In the last few days we’ve heard some new rumors – including potential names iSlate and iGuide.

Although Apple hasn’t officially acknowledged the existence of a tablet device, rumors have longed pointed to January as some sort of official announcement date. Now Fox News has confirmed an earlier Financial Times report that Apple will be holding a special media event on January 26 in San Francisco.

Although specific details surrounding the event are still tightly guarded, insiders say that the announcement is all about the mobile space. To add further fodder to the rumor mill, a number of reports have appeared from app developers who say Apple has requested that their programs be revised for larger resolutions.

The only people who are likely to be unhappy with this scheduled media event? The Macworld 2010 team. Last year Apple announced that it wouldn’t participate in future Macworld Expos, citing in part the difficulties of having to prepare a January presentation over the holiday season.

Despite the upcoming event, it’s become clear over the last few weeks that Apple doesn’t have to spend money on a big expo booth in order to get the tech and mainstream media foaming at the mouth.

What do you think will be announced at January’s special Apple event?

Tags: apple, Apple Tablet, iguide, iSlate, Tablet

With such strong competition from Mozilla and Microsoft, the only thing Opera can do to stay competitive is to innovate. And one has to hand it to them: although it doesn’t have a huge user base in the desktop web browser space, Opera is always one step ahead of the rest, for better or for worse.

With version 10.10, Opera has taken its biggest step into the unknown so far, marrying the web browser with the web server. It definitely makes it unique in the world of web browsers, but there’s always the lingering question whether all these new features are really something we need, or is it just confusing the users?

With Opera Unite integrated into the browser, the web becomes a read/write affair. You can share photos (10 GB of them), stream music, serve a chat or even an entire web site directly from your browser. At Opera, they have high hopes for the technology. From the official site:

“Our devices will evolve. From in-dash computers in trucks to entertainment systems in airplanes, and from a netbook in North Dakota to a phone in North Africa, every device is both a consumer and a provider of content.”

The idea is certainly interesting, but the web has been moving in another direction in the past couple of years: the cloud. Instead of having stuff run on your computer, your applications and your data reside in the cloud, with all the resources and the know-how provided by a company like Google. So yes, with Opera Unite, you can host a web site on your own home computer, but you might run into bandwidth issues; with Google Sites, you can easily create a web site without worrying about bandwidth, but you’re at Google’s mercy, so to say. So far, despite possible privacy and security issues, cloud computing has been taking over, and it’s hard to imagine Opera turning the tide in the other direction. Some Unite applications, however, like the media server or the chat, are quite useful and might win over some converts for the Norwegian browser.

Other interesting features in the new Opera 10.10 include Opera’s Turbo technology, which speeds up browsing by compressing web pages on Opera’s servers and delivering you the “lite” version, Opera Link, which lets you synchronize data across several computers, a slick new look with a resizable tab bar, and a BitTorrent-enabled download manager. See the full list of features here.