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Loading ...RIM may release Bold in Canada soon
More than a year since Research and Motion Ltd. released the last BlackBerry, the Toronto-based company may soon start selling its newest model in Canada.
The Bold, or 9000, is already available for purchase in German and Chile. RIM had previously said it would release the model this summer.
The company is calling the Bold a “high-end BlackBerry” with twice the screen resolution of current RIM models. It also has a full-sized headset jack, camera for capturing video, and in general, remains close in form factor to the Curve with a horizontal screen above a trackball and keyboard with one letter per key, the company said.
In the U.S., AT&T Inc. has said it will be the exclusive carrier for the newest release, but the company wouldn’t say precisely when the Bold would be made available.
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(3 votes, average: 5.33 out of 10) Loading ...Telus switching to GSM?
The rumour surfacing now is that Telus wants to switch to a GSM network from its current CDMA net. There’s good reason to think about it; the rest of the world is predominantly GSM. Telstra in Australia is shutting down its CDMA network to move to the GSM standard in April. SIM cards are handy. Your phone will work overseas (more revenue). Overseas phones will work here (more revenue).
(I’ve never understood why, when most of the rest of the world went GSM, two of the three carriers in Canada elected to go CDMA. We’re just contrarians, I guess.) Read the rest of this entry »
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Intel leaves One Laptop behind
It is with tear welling in eye that I note Intel has severed ties with One Laptop Per Child, a project to deliver cheap laptops to children in developing countries, a development that really should shock no one.
With both hulla and ballou last July, the chipmaker and OLPC announced Intel was joining the board of the project and would work with OLPC to develop cheap laptop technology. Never mind that OLPC was already pushing the XO, an AMD-based laptop, nor that Intel was offering a competing computer, though at twice the price, in the Classmate.
It’s ended in tears and recriminations, with Intel citing “irreconcilable differences” and OLPC chair Nicholas Negroponte rumbling that Intel never put anything into the relationship. They just couldn’t stay together, even for the children’s sake (cue sappy music). Read the rest of this entry »
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(Rate This Article) Loading ...Shocking news: Voice to text that works
If you’ve been to a trade show over the last five or six years, you must have seen the demos of software that promises to convert your spoken words into characters in a word processing program. With a little bit of “training” on a single voice, these programs were often capable of rendering prose that, while both surreal and erratically spelled, bore not a passing resemblance to what you said.
So Rogers Wireless’s announcement of a voice-mail-to-text-message service powered by SpinVox left me, shall we say, sceptical. If software that is actually trained to a voice is erratic, how can you expect a machine to recognize and transcribe any old stranger’s voice that leaves you a voice mail? Read the rest of this entry »
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(1 votes, average: 8 out of 10) Loading ...Vanity, thy name is LG Shine
So, off to trendy downtown T.O. hotspot Lobby (corporate slogan: “No, you can’t come in dressed like that”) for the announcement of the new lineup of cell phones from Rogers for the holiday season. It’s a rough life, this being forced to eat Kobe beef sliders and wash ‘em down with raspberry mojitos, but someone’s gotta do it. Read the rest of this entry »
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(1 votes, average: 10 out of 10) Loading ...iPhone impersonators and the landscape of Web design
Telus and HTC launched the HTC Touch smart phone at a downtown Telus retailer this morning. One’s coming in for a full review shortly, but I had some hands-on time with it at the launch, and I must say … well, it’s a smart phone.
It’s not explicitly positioned as an iPhone competitor, but it’s implicit. David Neale, chatting after the launch, referred to the iPhone as “opening the floodgates” for similar devices. Read the rest of this entry »
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(8 votes, average: 9.13 out of 10) Loading ...ZTE D90: Heavy texting
We have the new ZTE D90 mobile phone in the office for a test drive, courtesy of Telus and ZTE. I’ve mentioned in this space that at its launch, it gave the impression of a heavy texter’s dream. So how’s the performance?
To review: The D90 has a Fastap keypads, meaning alpha characters are squeezed in between the number keys. You don’t have to press number keys multiple times to change letters, which is a pain in the back of the front in text-centric situations like entering e-mail addies and contact information and, well, text messaging. I’ve hated previous iterations for their clutter, but the D90 is a different animal. Read the rest of this entry »
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(1 votes, average: 8 out of 10) Loading ...Two lines, one phone, and too much in LD charges
Rogers Wireless launched its Second Voice Line Service this morning, offering two phone lines on a single cell phone. It’s aimed at the SMB owner-operator crowd, with several features to recommend it, and one that should make you think twice.
Irv Witte, Rogers Wireless’s vp of business marketing, demoed the service for me last week. Upside: Two separate lines means two separate voice mail greetings, one for business callers and one for personal calls; you needn’t carry two phones, and you save on some of the overhead (system access fees, etc.) that a second phone entails; documenting the cost of cell phone use for tax and expense purposes is easier, as the calls are billed to two separate numbers; and you can have numbers in two different area codes, if you so desire. Read the rest of this entry »
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(3 votes, average: 6.33 out of 10) Loading ...Paying the iBill
Schadenfreude isn’t really my bag, but after suffering through roughly a kajillion iPhone news releases, articles and analyses, I got a chuckle out of what appears to be the first pothole on the iPhone highway, even though it’s service provider AT&T Wireless with egg on face.
Apparently, the bills are huge. Not expensive. Just really, really long. New York Times blogger David Pogue’s bill came with pages and pages documenting Every. Single. Data. Transaction, almost on a kilobyte-by-kilobyte basis.
The opus sent to Pogue, however, was apparently not as magnum as that sent to graphic designer and blogger Justine Ezarik. Watch her open her iBill — all 300 pages – on YouTube.
E-billing, anyone?
On a completely unrelated note, here’s an experimental use of the Windows shutdown tone that bears looking into.
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(3 votes, average: 8.67 out of 10) Loading ...A handset worth lusting after
Technology insists on doing this to me, and probably to you, too. You put off the new laptop or desktop purchase and watch the prices fall; you finally bite the bullet and make the buy; and a week later, something better/faster/cooler hits the market and makes you say, “Dammit, if I’d known …”
I broke down and bought a new cell phone last week, a U510 slider from Samsung. (Not that my previous phone was unsophisticated — it could make and take calls, and … well, actually, that’s about it.) It’s well spec’d for media, e-mail and Web access, quick snapshots and the like. It’s quite sexy in the way only a slider phone can be (have I perhaps been in this industry too long?). I was content.
Then I met this morning with representatives of ZTE Corp., the first mainland Chinese manufacturer to deliver a handset to the Canadian market. With the caveat that I haven’t had a full test-drive so I can’t tell you about call quality and the like, my once-over convinced me it’s worth lusting after. Read the rest of this entry »
