Canadian cell phone carrier Rogers Communications is extending its iPhone data plan promotion another month, as it tries to figure out how best to price data plans for smartphone users, CBC reported Thursday.
[…]
A Rogers representative the company told the CBC the offer is being extending through September to allow buyers of the new BlackBerry Bold to take advantage of it. The Bold was introduced only week ago.
What’s interesting is the new data packages scheduled to be offered after this date: a $25/500MB and $30/1GB plan should show up sometime in October. I know at least one friend doesn’t want the $30 hit per month for his BlackBerry, so he sticks with the $15 email-only package. $5 can actually make the world of difference to some price-sensitive customers, especially the student audience being targeted in the coming months. Going down to an admittedly quite reasonable $25 plan might convince more people to pick up these devices. There will also be more plans available: $60/3GB and $80/8GB, along with a low-end $15/2MB offering to fool the really cheap customers into overages. 😉
Additionally, even the lowest tier Rogers voice package ($20) paired with a $25 data plan would push ARPU to the magical $45/month required by business decisions and most data device hardware upgrades.
Of course, our voice plans are still gimped compared to the States, but colour me slightly more impressed.
Spring 2008 term has officially ended. For the past few days I’ve been trying to relax; as opposed to creating content for the Web, there’s been a lot of Halo 3 and other video games going on.
I start again at RIM on September 2nd. Things haven’t changed much from when I was there last, which should make for a smooth transition.
Hardware upgraded to a BlackBerry Bold as I’m a consumer whore with company loyalty. The screen is really sharp and the new processor gives a really responsive UI. The iPhone 3G was admittedly an attractive option but had two major buzzkills: no physical keyboard, and gimped push email. I had to trade my weaselled retentions plan in for something a bit more conventional, but I’ve now got a monthly plan encompassing some text messaging capabilities.
Warren also purchased me an Invisible Shield for the device. I highly recommend this product. Resale value will be much higher and any new iPods will definitely get one of these.
It’s move-in time for our neighbours, which means the landlord feels the need to test out his new bowling ball by dropping it down next door’s flight of stairs repeatedly. (In all reality, he’s probably using a hammer on something, but it sounds suspiciously like my initial description.) I’m hoping that this term, there’ll be some attractive girls in the same complex – but that’s probably a long shot. 😉
Here’s what my workstation setup now looks like after just under four months in the new place.
To manage my systems, I’m using a utility called Synergy with an OS X extension called SynergyKM. The MacBook Pro acts as the server: the display on the left is hooked up to the DVI port on the laptop, and the display on the right is connected to my Vista box.
When I mouse to the right side of the left monitor, the keyboard and mouse focus changes to the PC. (Synergy is running as a client under Vista.)
Finally, here’s a shot of my main PC workstation in its current opened state:
Just before heading into my marketing exam this evening, I was checking Crackberry and HowardForums for the usual selection of news. What I found was actually an interesting exercise in branding, using the time-honoured technique of showing us an attractive girl in underwear.
Virgin Mobile Canada apparently has launched the BlackBerry Pearl 8130 on their service, which I believe is a first for a Canadian MVNO; generally only the non-virtual carriers in North America have established relationships with RIM for devices and services. In Canada, Virgin is CDMA and runs off the Bell infrastructure – so if you get decent Bell coverage in your area, service will be about the same quality.
The thing that all the fanboys on HoFo seem to be noticing is the attractive female used in the promotional video. I believe one poster later in the thread described the model as ‘hott’, which leads me to believe he drooled on his keyboard during the video and it now duplicates keystrokes.
The primary focus of the thread and the Crackberry article (the hawt girl, in case you haven’t followed) is followed closely by an interestingly decent offer. A three year contract gets you a $0 device and a 8GB microSD card; plans start at $25 for voice and $30 for unlimited email/Web/IM, with explicit support for Windows Live Messenger and Facebook integration. Virgin also doesn’t charge for system access fees or incoming text messages at present, so consider that a $6.95 discount per month.
(There are also several other data packages available, including the traditional $15 unlimited email/BlackBerry Messenger plan. Another interesting plan seems to be the $45 email, web, text messaging, IM, voicemail and call display addon for the people who can’t get enough SMS action.)
What’s even more interesting about this $30 plan? BES access appears to be is enabled. That’s right; the BlackBerry informational page notes that unlimited access to enterprise email is included:
Enterprise email Our BlackBerry plans give you unlimited access to enterprise email if you:
Use the BlackBerry® Enterprise Server in your organization
Have a client access license
You get:
Secure access to corporate email
Corporate data access
Wireless email and calendar synchronization
Remote address lookup
I’ve written into the Virgin support team to confirm that BES is activated on their standard packages. I’ve also asked if the $15 plan includes BES support as well, and will update this post with my findingsthe answer is yes, as confirmed by Chris below.
If Since BES support is present, this would makes Virgin’s offering the only unlimited package in Canada with enterprise support. While this news isn’t quite the shakeup of a new wireless entrant, Virgin now would be my top pick for a CDMA provider over Telus or Bell.
Edit: Cleaned up some grammar. Edit 2: Updated with confirmation of BES inclusion.
You may be aware of my unconventional music preferences. Online, I’ve often produced self-deprecating pie charts and bar graphs making a statement about the contents of my library. While some armchair psychologists would say this is because I secretly have a deathwish or can empathize with the lyrics and use them as a metaphor for my own life, I reject those theories because they’re obviously nonsense. Sometimes, just tuning out lyrics and listening to a mass-marketable chord pattern is enough of a musical experience.
This emo phenomenon is even more pronounced when you look at my Zune Card. Note how all the artists from a "top played" selection are groups of four guys who really need to have their barbers stop standing crooked.
In no particular order except alphabetic, and because I’m interested in checking out Windows Live Writer’s support for uploading posts, here are some artists you might find kicking around my library. I can’t condone that you actually listen to any of them unless you’re really hard-up for content.
(What I really want to do with this post or potential series: hope that somebody puts in some angry comments below about their favourite group not being emo, and chuckle.)
"but during wiL’s years dabbling with drugs he was no longer active within a band and only began re-playing guitar during his rehabilitation as a form of therapy and it developed from there."
The oh-so-awesome "reliance on friendship"!
wiL has also shown his reliance on friendship. The song Silent Eyes from the Rain in Hell EP was written about Bayside drummer, John ‘Beatz’. whilst on tour with Aiden, Hawthorne Heights and Silverstein, the Bayside bus flipped on a patch of black ice. ‘Beatz’ died due to severe injuries.
Emo Rating: It doesn’t get much more emo than this. At least My Chemical Romance has a gothic feel going on, but these guys hate life on an equivalent Simple Plan level.
I can’t in good faith recommend any song off either album. "Move Along" is okay in Rock Band after an odd number of beers greater than five
Actually I don’t even know why I have the full album anyway, because it sucks and they’re all rated as "don’t like"
Some lyrics from "Can’t Take It", sung in a whine –
You speak to me I know this will be temporary You ask to leave, but I can tell you that I’ve had enough
I can’t take it This welcome is gone and I’ve waited long enough to make it and if you’re so strong you might as well just do it alone And I’ll watch you go
Emo Rating: Why won’t you stay? You’re so far away. (Never Say "I Told You So")
"Southern Weather" is the money track, although "Everyone Here Smells Like a Rat" is a pretty decent title
Drastic departure from the vocal styles of Underoath, making the album very tolerable as background music
Hopefully these five artists are enough to get your inner emo kid on. I’m not sure how many of you will care, but I’ll go down the list in future if anyone is actually, honestly interested in this stuff.
When I drop close to two grand on a laptop, I expect perfection – or at least close to it. I noticed this case alignment issue with my new MacBook Pro about two hours after opening the box.
Notice the gap on the left side? The rubber contacts should be solid around the entire enclosure. I’m pretty sure it’s the top case and not the latch as well; slightly pressing down on the top of the unit shifts the gap to the right side of the laptop.
For size comparison purposes, the gap is slighly smaller than a 1/8″ stereo jack. I probably wouldn’t be concerned if I’d had the laptop for a few months, but I’d rather not get dust on the screen when it’s closed.
Apparently this problem isn’t completely unheard of online, but most of the posts seem to be from 2007 or older and are filled with far too much Internet lawyering rage. Since it’s a new unit, and I’d rather not have it in for repair right out of the box, Apple has claimed that they’ll email me some FedEx shipping labels so I can perform an exchange. They unfortunately won’t cross-ship the replacement, so I’ll have to blow away the drive tomorrow and re-copy all my music onto the replacement system when it arrives.
For what it’s worth: the labels have yet to show up in my inbox yet, but it’s the long weekend so I’ll cut them some slack.
Does anybody think I’m overreacting, or agree that this is something that shouldn’t happen? I never had the same issue with my white MacBook, so I’d at least like to see equal build quality between the two units. Not quite angry yet: just disappointed at the QC.
This post continues my Microsoft Zune review, courtesy of the Matchstick and Chatthreads viral marketing campaign. The first part of my review dealt with the installation process and Zune jukebox software. This installment will finish up the software review. Previous posts in this series can be found at:
Oh, and if you’re reading this and feel so inclined, give the good people at Chatthreads something to do by clicking on the image below and submitting your comments about the Zune.
The Software (Continued)
The Device View
Status
This simple screen shows the current status of your Zune device, and allows you to control the sync operation. There’s really nothing else to say about it, except that just about everything on the page is a link that takes you to a more in depth analysis of that aspect of the operation. When installing, I chose to manually sync items to my Zune, simply because I have well over 8GB of music that I care to listen to. I started by dragging an album from the artists view in the music section down to the handy-dandy Zune icon. The entire album took about a minute to add. The main device page shows what is currently syncing to the device, what you’ve recently added to the device, and the completion percentage of the operation.
Every time that you drag some object (be it an album, a playlist, or a video, etc) to the device, a record called a sync group is created. These groups can be viewed in the device settings menu within the jukebox software, and allow you to easily see what you’ve added to the device, when you added it, and remove the entire group with a single button click. As you can see, I’ve added a few albums and a playlist to my device.
From this page, you can also manually create a sync group, which is similar to creating an autoplaylist that syncs directly to your Zune. Again, it would be nice if this feature were a little more developed, but for something simple like adding a bunch of Classic Rock tracks to my device, it’s more than adequate.
The main failing point of sync groups is also one of the bigger failing points of the autoplaylist feature. There is no option when creating either to limit the list by size. Meanwhile I have an 8GB Zune, and well over 60GB of music in my library, which makes adding any playlist to the Zune a guessing game. Nowhere in the software is the size of a playlist shown, until you try and put a list that is too big onto the Zune, at which point it complains and refuses to sync until you shave down the size of the list. A nice addition would be emulating iTunes, where the software syncs as much of the selected playlist as possible, and then tells the user which songs didn’t fit.
Even more exasperating is that the software gives the option to automatically re-encode audio files that are over a certain bit rate threshold to a lower bit rate when syncing to the Zune. This is a fantastic feature, as it allowed me to put roughly 150% more songs on the device for a small loss in quality. Again however, nowhere in the software does it list the size of the playlist before and after the conversion, making filling the Zune an even bigger game of chance when this feature is turned on.
Music, Playlists, Videos, Pictures, and Podcasts
Each of these sections acts exactly as its counterpart in the collection view of the software, with few exceptions. These are obvious things, like not being able to create a new playlist directly on the device in the playlists view.
Friends
To be honest, I haven’t quite figured out this part of the software yet. Jake and I, while reviewing on our own, haven’t had much time to use the two devices together. I would imagine that this section of the view will come alive once we do.
The Social View
The social view in the Zune jukebox software provides a direct link to the Zune Social from inside the software. It contains three sub views – friends, me, and inbox. The friends tab is the default, and shows a listing of all your registered friends. In this case, since my Zune id is linked to my Xbox Live id, it shows my friends from Xbox Live, only one of whom (Jake aka ev98) actually owns a Zune.
Friends
Clicking on the Zune tag of one of your friends takes you to an in-software summary of their Zune use. It shows their Zune card, all of the songs that they’ve recently listened to, and a list of their friends. Some of the songs in the listing are tagged with a button that says more info that takes you to a webpage containing album and artist details for that song. Below, you can see Jake’s Zune page and all the Slanty-Haired music that he listens to:
These online pages are where the Zune Social really excels. They remind me of the golden days of the Yahoo Launchcast service, a customizable online radio that played songs based on your ratings of album, artist, and genre. It had a huge index of songs, and much like the Zune Social, offered artist and album info for most every available song.
A typical album page on the Zune Social contains a large cover art picture, a listing of the songs on that album, complete with playable samples and the option to purchase either individual songs or the entire album, and a listing of other albums by that artist. The page also has a place for a professional album review, and a number of listener views, and highlights a Zune user who is the top listener to that particular artist. Each of these page elements hotlinks to another page of the site, giving it a Wikipedia-like quality, that allows an unsuspecting user to simply browse for hours on end.
Similar pages, although without option to purchase, can be accessed from directly in player by clicking on the artist name instead of the more info button. These in-player versions of the pages are separated into categories that give artist information (including top-played songs, every album ever released, and a listing of your friends who listen to the artist), a full length biography complete with pictures, a listing of all Zune users who listen to the artist, and a list of all related artists in the Zune Social library. All of this make the service a prime tool for discovering great new music, which really, is what music should be all about.
Here you can see the Zune Page for EminemThe Bio page for EminemAnd Finally, a list of artists related to Eminem. This feature makes finding new music that you might like very easy
Me
This page in the software is very similar to a friend’s page, simply showing your Zune card, your plays, and a listing of your friends. Following the hotlink from the page to the Zune.net profile website allows you to customize your Zune card, and post it to Facebook as an application.
Customizing the appearance of the Zune card was a simple matter, although for some reason, the word ‘Zune’ is not allowed to appear in your status message – its banned like a swear word. So instead of ‘is reviewing the Zune,’ I had to settle for the status message ‘is reviewing the Zoon.’ Below, you can see my Zune page. Note the lack of Slanty-haired four-pieces in comparison to Jake’s page.
Inbox
Another aspect of the social that I haven’t quite figured out yet – this appears to be some sort of in-service email client. I’ll write about it later on once I’ve used it a little bit more.
The Disc View
As expected, shows the disc currently in the CD-Rom drive of your computer. In my case, it happens to be Guns ‘n Roses Appetite for Destruction. The view gives album art, a list of songs, and the option to import them into your library. The player can rip CDs in WMA CBR, WMA VBR, WMA Lossless, or MP3.
Outro
That concludes Part 2 of my Microsoft Zune Review. To recap, this part concluded the Zune Jukebox Software portion of the review, and touched ever so lightly on the Zune Social.
Stay tuned for my review of the Zune hardware device, as well as my impressions regarding the Zune Social.
From a HowardForums post, I’ve found out that the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic is seeking comments from people affected by Bell or Rogers’ throttling. This refers to Bell’s global limitation of about 30K/s for BitTorrent, and Rogers areas affected by Ellacoya/Sandvine boxes.
I’ve written Robert Hester an email about my own experiences on TekSavvy, which I’ll repost below. If you’ve been affected by this nonsense, it might be worth your while to write in before a decision is made in September.
Hi Robert,
I read a post from a CIPPIC alias on HowardForums (http://howardforums.com/showthread.php?t=1406593) and figured I’d contribute my experiences with Bell’s internet throttling.
I’m a Computer Science student in Waterloo, Ontario, and currently subscribe to TekSavvy – a Bell DSL reseller. I chose them because I consider Bell Sympatico service to be substandard in the market: Bell’s technical support is lacking at best, they limit bandwidth usage to 60GB per month, and they don’t offer additional features such as static IP addresses.
Bell has applied throttling to their wholesale customers including TekSavvy, specifically for P2P protocols such as BitTorrent. When this network management is active – which I find tends to be more than twelve hours out of every day – my BitTorrent download speeds are limited to 30-50KB/s. This is a far cry from the 5Mbit (~500KB/s) service that I pay for.
What really disappoints me is that an independent reseller has to suffer because Bell unilaterally decides to squash competition. Unfiltered P2P and unlimited bandwidth usage are key competitive features that I’m willing to pay for. When a third party like Bell decides that they can’t compete and uses technical restrictions to bring other services down to the same level of reduced functionality, I’d go as far to say it’s an unfair trade practice. In my opinion: if this practice is not currently illegal, it should be.
I have no objection to reasonable network management, but reducing download speeds to 10% of their potential based on a transmission protocol is far from reasonable.
Thanks for your time and consideration on this important issue. Please feel free to contact me at the email address or phone number below if you require anything else.
This application and all support for it has officially been moved to my new website. Please visit that location to download the latest version or to submit a comment.
In my the first part of my Microsoft Zune review, I mentioned that frustration with the autoplaylist feature of the Zune jukebox software had driven me to write a VB app that converts iTunes playlists to Zune compatible *.zpl playlists. On Jake’s suggestion, that app is now available for download here.
The program is pretty simple to use. Just follow these handy steps:
Download the zip file and unzip it to a directory of your choice
Open iTunes and close the Zune jukebox software
Right click on the playlist that you wish to export and select ‘Export Song List…’ from the context menu
Choose where you’d like to save the playlist, and ensure that ‘Save as Type’ is set to *.xml
Launch the ‘iTunes to Zune Playlist Converter.exe’ application from the unzip directory
Use the browse button to load the saved *.xml file into the ‘iTunes Playlist File (XML)’ field
Use the browse button to choose where you’d like to save the converted Zune Playlist file. Note that for the Zune player to recognize the new playlist, it must be saved to C:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents\My Music\Zune\Playlists\ on Windows XP, or C:\Users\UserName\Music\Zune\Playlists on Windows Vista.
Click the ‘Convert’ button, and wait for the success message box to pop up.
Launch the Zune jukebox software and go into the ‘Playlists’ view. You should see your newly created playlist in the pane to the left. Note that it might take a second to recognize the playlist, and another minute or two after that until the list is playable, depending on the size of the list. This is because the Zune software has to sift through the playlist and link each referenced file to one in its current library before the list can be used.
There, that wasn’t too hard, was it? Lastly, it’s important to remember that this only works if the iTunes library and the Zune library in question are drawing from the same media files! That means that you should have the Zune jukebox software set to monitor the iTunes music folder that you are drawing from, so that the same files are referenced in both programs’ libraries.
This little hack worked well for me, and allowed me to load my Zune with playlists created in iTunes, without having to try and use the gimped Zune rating system and autoplaylists to do so.
Enjoy, and if you have any questions or comments, post here, or email me at jonfritz at gmail dot com.
Cheers,
Jon
Edit: Thanks to David F for pointing out a flaw in the program that made converting multiple playlists in one session a pain. The application is now fixed. If anybody notices any more bugs, please let me know so that they can be fixed immediately.
Reading Kotaku earlier today, I noticed an article about one of Sony’s upcoming video games, LittleBigPlanet. This year, David Reeves decided to suggest that selling one’s own creations in LittleBigPlanet amounts to “iTunes meets eBay”. This is the second year in a row Sony executives have compared their product to “iTunes meeting X”, where X was MySpace last year.
