Next is Now: Rogers branding video

Rogers held their annual shareholders meeting today, and like many of these types of meetings, there’s some slick, well-made corporate video to set the mood.  I’ve been on the editing end of more than one of these, so I know how it works.  The thing is, this one from Rogers, well, kind of works. Using stats projected in urban environments, it communicates the message that the future is here… or “Next is Now” if you will. Some of the stats are somewhat odd though.  I did laugh a bit when…

Read More

RIM announces Blackberry 9100 Pearl 3G, coming in May to Bell, Telus and Rogers

This week Research in Motion (RIM), is holding their annual WES event, in sunny Orlando, instead of Waterloo Ontario. On Tuesday they announced their new Blackberry OS 6, which we posted a video of a few posts below. OS 6 is coming later this year, and is RIM’s attempt to catch up to Android, iPhone and Windows Phone 7. Also announced were 2 new handsets, the new Bold 9650, a refresh of last years CDMA Tour, with the optical track-pad, and more RAM (in preparation for OS 6). More interestingly…

Read More

Ridley Scott on Alien Prequel

It’s no secret that Ridley Scott has been working on making a new Alien prequel. Originally slated to be a film directed by Scott protege Carl Erik Rinsch, Ridley decided to pick up the reins himself, so that Rinsch can spend the time making Small.   Since taking on the director’s role for the movie, rumour has it that the prequel will actually be a trilogy. There’s also new details on where the focus is going to be in the prequel… It’s set in 2085, about 30 years before Sigourney [Weaver’s character…

Read More

Microsoft makes bank on HTC Android devices: Weird, right?

The last 24 hours have been pretty interesting, and just a little odd, in the smart phone space. Beside HP purchasing Palm, Microsoft has announced a licensing deal with long time hardware partner HTC. The odd thing is that this applies to HTC’s Android devices, not their range of Windows Phone hardware.  This means that for every HTC Android device sold going forward, Microsoft gets a small piece.  It feels like the early 1990’s all over again! Microsoft claims that Android infringes on several user interfce and operating system patents….

Read More

HP buys Palm!

Just in, Hewlett Packard has purchased ailing smart phone maker Palm Inc. for about  $1 billion in cash.  Palm has been up for sale recently. In fanboy circles, yours truly included, the hope was that Taiwanese manufacturer HTC would buy Palm, and do something spectacular with Palm’s webOS.  So much for that dream. HP was always considered a possible suitor for Palm.  This could be a good move for the computer manufacturer, as Dell, their chief rival in the US has recently shown a strong line up of mobility hardware…

Read More

Is Microsoft’s Kin coming to Fido?

When Microsoft announced their Kin mobile phones and service, there was direct mention of both US and European carriers, but Canada was missing off that list.  That doesn’t mean we’re not getting it, and if the phone’s own files are any indication, it may hit Fido.  Conflipper, who’s well known in the phone hacking community, has dug through the provisioning files of a Kin and found a number of international carriers listed, including Fido here in Canada. If you’re not sure what provisioning files are, they’re files that reside on…

Read More

Microsoft releases Vail Server public preview

On Monday, Microsoft released the public preview of of the latest home server, codenamed Vail. Interestingly, they’ve dropped the word “Home” from the naming convention, which goes in line with the rumours that they may also be targeting this software for very small businesses as well.  You can get yourself a copy to try out here. There’s a lot of new features in Vail. The two major changes are significant. On the surface, the UI has been given the Windows 7 treatment, and at the heart of it, Vail is…

Read More

The long and winding tale of a blogger, a lost prototype and the cops who came a-knocking

Except for a brief roundtable discussion which we published last week, we largely steered clear of the whole Gizmodo iPhone 4G leak, but recent events make it interesting to look at in a different light. This past Friday night, California’s Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT) police, operating under a search warrant, busted down Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s front door home while he was out, and confiscated all his computer equipment.  To get you caught up on the story, here’s the Cliff Notes version of events leading up to it:

Read More

Steam For Mac private beta suggests May release date

Valve Software announced last month that their Steam gaming platform would be available for Mac by the end of April, or possibly May.  Although it hasn’t hit wide release yet, it has been in a closed beta for a few weeks.  There’s an exhaustive thread running on the Steam forums, which suggests that a May launch day is likely.  Valve’s official word is still “coming soon”. Steam itself will require OS X 10.5 or higher, while Valve Source games will required Leopard, or Snow Leopard to run.  You can also…

Read More

Free Comic Book Day – Toronto style

For a good eight years now, Free Comic Book Day has become an early May tradition, where comic book retailers promote the event and hand out copies of comic books to customers, which has unsurprisingly become a hit.  You can see the North America wide list of artist signings at FreeComicBookDay.com This year,Greg Dunford, writer of Hard Drive and friend of the show has organized a Free Comic Day Comic Crawl [Facebook event] through Toronto, with a number of notable guests from fandom.  If you know of events going down…

Read More

Blackberry OS 6 unveiled on video

There’s a fair amount of news coming out from the RIM camp these days, but the one thing that is probably the most important is how they’ve refreshed their OS with Blackberry 6, and the above video gives you some ideas. It’s fresh, funky and oh so modern, that’s because it features every electronics manufacturer’s favourite musical act Black Eyed Peas. At least the song isn’t the grammatically questionable “I Gotta Feeling”. Seriously though, Blackberry 6 does have some interesting new elements to it, including a much better Webkit-based browser,…

Read More

Wardriving the planet: Google Street View style

Most people love the Street View function in Google Maps, and rightly so. It’s a neat gimmick at the very least, and if you find yourself in an unknown area, it can actually be useful. It’s helped fight crime, by helping police rescue an allegedly kidnapped girl,  but the Street View cars have been at the centre of controversy before, including snapping pics while driving along private roads, killing Bambi and more. This this now includes the Street View cars operating as the world’s largest fleet of wardriving vehicles.  Wardriving…

Read More