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Apple iPhone, Coming to Canada

Thursday, June 21st, 2007

Apple iPhone, Coming to Canada

The very hyped about, and most awaited phone, is coming to Canada. That’s right the Apple iPhone will be coming to Canada! I inquired about it with Rogers Wireless, and I got a response back shortly afterwards. Here’s the key points from their response:

Rogers is actively working with Apple to launch the iPhone in Canada
as soon as possible and will be the exclusive provider of the iPhone in
Canada.

Please be advised that Rogers will be offering the iPhone exclusively
in Canada.

Launch date and pricing for Canada are not yet available.

Other Canadian wireless carriers will not launch the iPhone; Rogers will be the only Canadian wireless carrier to offer the iPhone.

This is great news! Now, to elaborate a bit on that.

The iPhone will be exclusively offered at Rogers in Canada because it’s currently the only Wireless Carrier in Canada to be using up-to-date Wireless service technology. Telus is using really old technology, and Bell is using newer technology, but still not new enough.

As I understand it, the iPhone is a 2G Quad Band GSM and EDGE phone, while Rogers supports 3G Quad Band GSM and EDGE service. So, the iPhone and the Rogers Wireless service are compatible (and then some).

I’m going to estimate that the iPhone will be released in Canada in August. As for the price, I’m going to estimate… for the 4GB, $599 CAD with no contract and $399 CAD with a 3 year contract. For the 8GB, $699 CAD with no contract and $449 CAD with a 3 year contract.

One problem I see here, is that data plans in Canada are expensive; and with the iPhone you’ll probably be using lots of data. So you’ll most likely be seeing “iPhone Plans”, just like “Blackberry Plans“. The iPhone Plans will have considerably more data for considerably cheaper than the Blackberry Plans. That’s my guess, anyways.

The iPhone itself is actually smaller than people think it is. It’s thinner than the Blackberry Curve, and is just a bit bigger than my closed RAZR V3i. It’s actually thinner than the V3i, too. Which is amazing, since it has way more features. The iPhone is a little heavier, though.

Apple has said that the screen has been “upgraded” from a Plastic screen, to a Glass screen. That may seem like a good thing… until you drop it and the screen shatters into a million pieces (it’s probably temperated, though, so it’ll just crack). The battery life is pretty impressive, at least. Up to 8 hours of Talk time, 6 hours of Internet, 7 hours of Video, 24 hours of music/audio or 250 hours of standby time. Which probably exceeds most (Smart)Phones, MP3 players and even the iPod 5.5 Generation (Video).

For those of you in other parts of the world, Rogers also told me this:

Apple is planning to introduce the iPhone in Europe (Q4 2007) and Asia
(2008).

I’m looking forward to the release of the iPhone in Canada. Hey, maybe I’ll even save up to get one!

Posted in Computers, Miscellaneous, News | 6 Comments »

Artificial Hype

Friday, June 8th, 2007

You see it all the time, and almost everywhere. It’s on TV, the Internet and even in stores. Hype. Something that seems almost critical to whether a product launch date is a success or a flop. But, most Hype is Artificial. It’s simply created by companies who want to make their product seem really good. It’s often done when the product is announced, on the Product’s site and when the product is marketed. In today’s world, where news travels fast, this Hype is magnified many times by the news of the products gets posted about, all over the Internet. Of course, Hype isn’t a bad thing, but it needs to be real Hype, not just over-exaggerated “cool” features.

Let’s take the iPhone for example. It’s has huge amounts of Hype. Most of it being Artificial Hype. Yes, the iPhone looks cool, but if you really think about all it is, you’ll get it. It is simply a SmartPhone with a touch-sensitive screen, a few GigaBytes of Memory, a Music/Video player, a modern-looking GUI (Graphical User Interface) and a sleek looking shell. It’s not like any of this is new technology. The Palm Treo has always had a touch-screen, you can buy memory cards with like 8GBs of memory on them, most new phones have a Music player built in (Video’s a little less common, because of battery life), a GUI is a GUI, it can be made however cool, or however lame the company wants it to be and the Shell is also a Shell, it can (and has been this way for a long time) be made however the company wants. So, really, the only Hype should be about a Phone coming with a couple Gigs of Memory and a Video player. Why should there be Hype about the GUI? It’s not like it’s something new. Anyone could’ve made a GUI that looks and works like that, Apple just did it first.

Okay, so I didn’t mean to pick on Apple, or the iPhone. It just happened to be a really good example on Artificial Hype.

Yes, Hype is already defined as excessive publicity, but, Artificial Hype is extremely excessive publicity, which isn’t always truthful.

So, the next time you’re thinking about a buying something that sounds really cool, really think about it, and see if all the Hype about it is actually real, or if it’s Artificial.

Posted in Miscellaneous, Rants | 3 Comments »

The Day I Didn’t Check My Email, Didn’t Read My Feeds and Didn’t Clear Out the SPAM Comments

Wednesday, May 16th, 2007

Yesterday, May 15, 2007, I somehow didn’t check my email, read the various feeds I’m subscribed to or clear out the SPAM Comments on this Blog. In fact, I barley went on the computer at all. I know, awful, right?

Well, that left me with:

  • 28 New Emails (not bad, actually, sometimes I get 40+ in a day)
  • 112 New Feeds Items
  • 57 SPAM Comments (which have slowed down quite a bit, I used to get hundreds in a day)

I don’t mind reading 28 emails (most of which are from the WP-Hackers Mailing List), but 112 items in my Feed reader is a little crazy. 😛 Only 58 more…

Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »

First Contribution to WordPress

Sunday, May 13th, 2007

WordPressI have submitted a ticket and patch to WordPress Trac. This is my first contribution to WordPress (other than some of my opinions 😛 ). The patch makes it so that the BrowseHappy (which I disagree with, but that’s a different topic) image only shows on versions of IE lower than 7. It’s quite a simply fix, just adding some conditional comments around a string, but it’s still helpful anyways.

The patch probably isn’t going to make it into WordPress 2.2 (supposed to be released on May 16, 2007; it’s now in RC2), but it should get into 2.3. 😀

Posted in Blogging, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

How’s Forbidden Land Twisted PageGetter?

Sunday, May 6th, 2007

Oh, that’s right, you won’t be able to read this post, since you’re banned! Anywho…

I recently noticed that a Bot, that identifies itself as “Twisted PageGetter”, has been crawling this blog (more specifically, my Feed) quite frequently. Last month it made about 10 932 hits, and this month (as of May 6, 2007 at about 2AM) about 1883 times. That’s some serious crawling. I’ve yet to find any information on what exactly this Bot does, and what it crawls for. So, I decided to Block it, and send it a nice 403 Forbidden Error. Not that it uses much bandwidth (didn’t even use 1MB last month). I have lots of Bandwidth anyways. No, I banned it because it’s throwing off my Stats. Plus it’s not useful and doesn’t seem to be doing anything good.

If you’re wondering, its User-Agent is “Twisted PageGetter” and its IP Address is “207.0.19.182”. If you want to block it, you can put this code in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "Twisted PageGetter" [NC] 
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [F,L]

That’ll give it a 403 Forbidden Error when it tries to access your site. Hopefully it’ll “get the message”, and stop crawling your site.

Hopefully “Twisted PageGetter” will be gone from my Blog now… 😛

Update [May 6, 2007]: Twisted PageGetter tried to crawl my Feed again today. You know what it got? A big fat 403 Forbidden Error! Ha!

Twisted PageGetter Blocked

Posted in Blogging, Miscellaneous, Rants | 7 Comments »

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