Blackberry Bold 9700 Hits The Streets

Research In Motion is a company that realizes that its future growth will be into the consumer space as every corporate human on earth has a Blackberry (it seems that way in any case). Therefore it’s important for them to release devices that appeal to consumers while also appealing to the corporate market. The Blackberry Bold 9700 which was announced today is such a device:

Research In Motion (RIM) (Nasdaq: RIMM; TSX: RIM) today announced the sleek and powerful BlackBerry® Bold™ 9700 smartphone. The new BlackBerry Bold 9700 offers an extensive array of high-end communications and multimedia features in a compact and highly refined design that will appeal to both men and women and for both professional and personal use.

The BlackBerry Bold 9700 smartphone offers top-of-the-line performance, functionality and features with support for 3G HSDPA networks around the world, a next-generation (624 MHz) processor, 256 MB Flash memory, built-in GPS and Wi-Fi®, a 3.2MP camera and a sharp, dazzling display. Cutting edge engineering and premium finishes extend to the exterior of the handset as well, with a smoothly integrated touch-sensitive trackpad and a highly tactile, distinctive, fretted keyboard. The dark chrome frame and leatherette back add to the new smartphone’s sleek and elegant look, while the narrow profile, balanced weight and soft-touch sides allow it to feel incredibly comfortable in one hand.

Okay. That sounds like a smart phone that I’d want to get. Although I would have to see how that “touch-sensitive trackpad” works. While I’m guessing that it’s a replacement for the trackball that has been present on Blackberries for some time, I don’t know if I’m sold on it just yet. But then I wasn’t sold on the fact on the trackball replacing the scroll wheel in Blackberries a few years ago. Other than the fact that it needs frequent cleaning, I find that it is a great feature on the device. Perhaps this will be too once I wrap my head around it.

Oh yeah, my “new best friends at Rogers” didn’t waste any time telling me that they were going to be carrying the Bold 9700. It will be $299 on a three year plan. I expect other carriers world wide to be making similar announcements today. Expect to see this in stores next month.

Ballmer Comments On Sidekick Outage…. This Should Be Fun

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made his first public comment about the Sidekick circus yesterday in Network World. Here’s what he said:

“It is something we are going to have to address and explain to customers our method and process and quality approach and what went wrong in that case and how we are making sure that it does not happen again,”

But it gets better than that. Here’s what else he said:

“It is not clear there was data loss,” he said. “Initially we thought there was. We are working hard to get all the users’s data back in the Sidekick case. I think we believe we will get all user data back at this juncture.”

Oh really? If there was no data loss, why tell users that there was data loss after you and T-Mobile stalled on saying anything for a week? Why put users through that sort of stress if there wasn’t data loss of some sort? As for regaining customer trust, try this response from the chair throwing one:

“People will want to know, is our approach different for SharePoint Online, is our approach different for the enterprise infrastructure. I think we have good answers, but I know we are going to continue to upgrade our processes and have to upgrade how we talk about this stuff, because we are going to get more questions.”

He better hope that his approach is different for the other Microsoft cloud products, because I’m guessing that people think that they’re suspect at the moment because of this fiasco.

Steve my boy, you need better answer than these as they’ve done little to make people feel warm and fuzzy all over.

Apple Releases A Ton Of New Product…. Fanbois Rejoyce And Give Thanks To “The Steve” [UPDATED x3]

Apple after announcing a record setting quarter yesterday, released a pile of new product today. Here’s the highlights:

• There’s a new MacBook with a new durable polycarbonate unibody design with LED-backlit display, glass multi-touch trackpad and a 7 hour battery life. It weighs 4.7 pounds and contains a 2.26 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of RAM, 250GB HD and NVIDIA GeForce 9400M integrated graphics card. This is now the entry level MacBook in Apple’s lineup.
• The Mac Mini also gets updated. There’s a 2.26GHz Core 2 Duo CPU with 2GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive model and a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive.  Both machines sport the  GeForce 9400M GPU and 8x SuperDrive. The big news is that there’s a new Mac Mini Server that comes with OS X Server for unlimited clients and a pair of hard drives. It also sports a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, 4GB of RAM, and a GeForce 9400M GPU.
• New iMacs hit the streets as well. There’s a 21.5″ and a 27″ model with a LED backlit screen. The iMac universe starts with 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB drive model and goes up from there. But the 27″ model is the one that the fanbois will be wetting their panties over. It will have 2.06GHz quad-core Core i5 processor and Radeon HD 4850 graphics. Sweet!
• The Mighty Mouse is dead. Enter the Magic Mouse. The entire mouse is a multi touch surface that allows you to do the same sort of gesture based actions that MacBook users have had for some time. Oh, it has one button and no scroll wheel. Shock. Not.
• There’s a new Apple Remote that looks like the newer iPods.

I don’t see any other changes on Apple’s site, but if I trip over something else I will update this post.

UPDATE: Here’s something interesting. If you look here, note this in the “Graphics and video support” section of the iMac tech specs page:

“27-inch models also support input from external DisplayPort sources (adapters sold separately).”

That implies that the 27 inch model supports video INPUT. Could that mean I can use this iMac as a TV? If so, that’s a game changer!

UPDATE #2: MacWorld has the details on this new input capability. In short, the answer is yes to using this new iMac as a TV:

In a clever touch, the 27-inch iMac has a new feature that dramatically increases its versatility. Via a series of adapters Apple says will be available shortly, users will be able to attach external display sources, such a DVD players or even other computers, to the iMac’s display. At that point, those sources will take over the iMac’s display, effectively turning it into an external monitor or an HDTV.

UPDATE #3: There are new AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule products as well. MacWorld claims that the new AirportExtreme will “provide up to 50 percent better Wi-Fi performance and up to 25 percent better range than the previous iteration” and “new technologies in Time Capsule and refinements to Time Machine make backing up to Time Capsule using Snow Leopard up to 60 percent faster than before.”

Sidekick Users Can Get Their Contacts Back Now

At least Microsoft is making progress with this nightmare. According to this post from Microsoft, Sidekick owners can use a recovery tool on T-Mobile’s Web site to get their contacts back:

The Danger / Microsoft team continues to work around the clock and has completed its latest round of rigorous tests. We are now ready to make the first phase of the content restoration process available to you, starting with personal contacts.

This data restoration effort is only necessary for the minority of customers who lost data from their Sidekick devices.

I don’t know about the “minority of customers who lost data from their Sidekick devices” as there’s a lot of pissed off Sidekick users out there, but at least there’s a light at the end of this tunnel. The question is, how long will it take to get everything else back?

Microsoft Says That Security Essentials Has Found Lots Of Nasty Stuff On Users Computers

Microsoft has an interesting post on their Marware Protection Center blog that seems  Security Essentials is hard at work making the Internet Safer for Windows users. In the process of doing so, they’ve found lots of bad stuff on computers:

Computers reporting detections up to October 6: almost four million detections on 535,752 distinct machines. The detections are eight times the machine count because many computers are infected with multiple threats.

Not that I expected Microsoft to say anything different, but I know from my daily interactions with customers that there’s a lot of bad stuff out there on computers. So this is plausible from my standpoint. Another thing they noted is that Windows XP machines were more likely to be infected than Vista boxes which, in turn, were more infected than Win 7 machines. Read into that what you will.

So, does that make Security Essentials more effective than other anti-virus products? That’s hard to say. My guess is no, but to settle the issue, someone needs to do is to have it go head to head against the usual suspects of AVG, Symantec, McAfee and we’ll see how good it really is. Having said that, I have been installing it lately on some customer’s computers and I have no problems with it at the moment. It’s pretty good for what it is and you can do worse than not trying it (like using nothing at all).

Sidekick Recovery Takes Time Says Microsoft

I guess Microsoft must be feeling the heat as they came out with a statement yesterday apologizing for the amount of time it is taking to get Sidekick data back online so that Perez Hilton can stop bashing them on his Twitter feed:

The Danger / Microsoft team is continuing to work around the clock on the data restoration process.  We apologize that this is taking so long, but we want to make sure we are doing everything possible to maintain the integrity of your data.

There’s a timeframe of “this week” in the statement to get everything online, and for their sake  I hope they make it. If they do get the data back on line and everybody is happier, then that will take the wind out of the sails of the lawsuits that were filed last week. That would make life easier for Microsoft and T-Mobile I would think.

Harvard Says Canadian Broadband Service Sucks…. No Kidding! You Think?

Harvard today came out with a 232 page study that confirms what most Canadians already know. Canadians have crappy broadband service:

Canada was 22nd overall out of 30 countries surveyed by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Canada ranked 16th on broadband adoption, 20th on speed and capacity, and 25th on price. Japan, Sweden and South Korea headed up Harvard’s rankings, while the United States placed above Canada at 13th overall.

Canada “is often thought of as a very high performer, based on the most commonly used benchmark of penetration per 100 inhabitants,” the study said. “Because our analysis includes important measures on which Canada has had weaker outcomes — prices, speeds and 3G mobile broadband penetration — in our analysis it shows up as quite a weak performer, overall.”

It also states another fact that Canadian Internet users know all too well. There is no real competition because smaller ISPs don’t have the ability to lease the incumbents communication infrastructure to provide their own service:

“Early aggressive facilities-based competition certainly made Canada an early starter, but it does not seem to have enabled it to maintain its standing,” the report said. “The Canadian experience suggest[s] that reliance purely on competition between strong cable incumbents and telephony incumbents may be insufficient to sustain high penetration or achieve high capacity and low competitive pricing in the long term.”

Canada has taken a “half-hearted” approach to open access, which enables a new entrant company to lease lines from a network owner to provide its own internet services to customers. The CRTC implemented open-access rules in 1997, but the report said the commission messed them up by allowing network owners to charge the highest lease rates in the developed world, about 70 per cent higher than similar fees in South Korea and Denmark.

The rules also had a “sunset” clause, meaning that open access would be discontinued in 2002. The CRTC extended the rules indefinitely in 2001, after few companies took up the offer.

These high rates and “regulatory hesitance” likely contributed to fewer new competitors making investments, the study said. Other countries that have had strong rules have fared better. France, as one example, has very little cable-versus-phone-company competition, yet it ranks well in Harvard’s survey — seventh overall — because of strong enforcement of open-access rules.

Well, I guess all of that blows that study funded by ISPs like Bell, Bell Aliant, Rogers, Cogeco, Telus, Shaw and SaskTel and parroted written by telecommunications consultant Mark Goldberg straight to hell doesn’t it? Goldberg doesn’t think so. In fact he didn’t waste any time blasting this study:

“Preliminary examination seems to indicate that many of the Harvard rankings appear to incorporate the same problematic data points from reports and measurement tools that we have already discussed,” he wrote on his blog.

The only thing that is problematic about the data Mr. Goldberg is that it shows that Canadian ISPs, in particular Bell, Bell Aliant, Rogers, Cogeco, Telus, Shaw and SaskTel have been doing a craptastic job of providing quality Internet access to Canadians. As a result they don’t want anybody to come in and slap them silly for doing so.

It’s high time that the Canadian government grew a pair and forced these ISPs to provide Canada with Internet service that is comparable to the rest of the world. I’d normally say that it’s the job for the above ISPs to do that, but they’re clearly too busy hiding behind studies like the one Mr. Goldberg parroted wrote for them to do that, so it’s up to government to force them to do it.

Lets hope the government does this sooner rather than later because Canadians have waited long enough for world class Internet access.

Most If Not All Sidekick Data Recovered Says Microsoft…. O Rly?

Here’s another plot twist in a story that has had a number of plot twists. T-Mobile posted this message on their Sidekick forum this morning:

We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users’ personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible.

I guess this means that they had a backup after all? Or does this mean that the sabotage angle of this story was bogus? Or perhaps they found who did it and “encouraged” them to help resolve the issue? Seriously, you have to wonder how they went from all the data being lost to most if not all the data being recovered in such a short space of time. We’ll never get answers to those questions I suspect.

In any case the proof is in the pudding as they say, so we’ll see if everything comes back up for users. It would likely go a long way to mitigating those lawsuits that were filed yesterday. Sadly for T-Mobile and Microsoft, it will do nothing to stop users from running to buy a Blackberry or iPhone on another carrier. Nor will it stop the damage to their respective reputations. The damage has already been done on those fronts.

Wind Mobile Launch Plans Leaked…. Again

Trying to find out what Wind Mobile is planning on doing has become some sort of national sport. A tipster on the Mobile Ninjas board has posted launch details that seem really interesting. First, there will only be three plans and they will have the following features:

• No contracts
• No System Access Fee
• No Caller ID or Voice Mail fees
• No in province Long Distance

No pricing as of yet, so I’ll have to reserve judgment. But on the surface it sounds good. Next is their phone lineup:

• Blackberry Bold 9700
• HTC Snap/Dash 3g
• Huawei U8220
• There will also be a Samsung slider. Not too sure on the model but it is one with a full slide out keyboard.

Okay, so it’s not a huge phone lineup. But I recall that the phone lineup for Fido wasn’t huge either when it launched in the 90′s. One more detail. All the stores will have Microsoft Surface tables in their stores. I’m sure it’s for the eye candy factor.

All of this seems to be a huge departure from the other “leak” that I reported on previously. I wonder if the previous “leak” was fake as Wind said it was? Or was it an attempt to gauge consumer reaction to their launch plans? I suspect we’ll never get a straight answer to that.

The only detail that’s missing is pricing. If the pricing is good, a lot of people will seriously consider defecting from their current mobile phone company. I know that I would consider doing so.

Sidekick Outage Results In Lawsuits Being Filed

From the “what took them so long” department comes the first lawsuits over the Sidekick outage being filed. One of them highlights the fact that there was apparently no backup of users data. Something that I’ve touched on before:

T-Mobile and its service providers ought to have been more careful the use of backup technology and policies to prevent such data loss” said Ira P. Rothken, an attorney working on that case. “We are hopeful that T-Mobile and the rest of the defendants will do the right thing, use this as an opportunity to redesign the system as a new standard for cloud computing storage, and provide full compensation for the data loss.”

Another highlights the fact that the data that was lost has a high value, which is something else that I’ve touched on in the past:

Another suit, filed on behalf of Maureen Thompson “and all others similarly situated” seeks unspecified damages for Thompson and others who have lost data as a result of the recent Sidekick problems.

According to her lawyer, Thompson owns a Sidekick used primarily by her daughter, an aspiring model, singer, and songwriter who used her Sidekick to store personal and business contacts, appointments, and even irreplaceable song lyrics not stored anywhere else. The lawyer said that Thompson bought the device “primarily because T-Mobile promised that any data would be protected and available no matter what happened to the phone.”

“T-Mobile’s initial efforts to reimburse Sidekick users are a step in the right direction, but fail to sufficiently compensate Sidekick users for this disastrous loss of data,” Thompson attorney Jay Edelson said in a statement. “T-Mobile and Microsoft promised to safeguard the most important data their customers possess and then apparently failed to follow even the most basic data protection principles. What they did is unthinkable in this day and age.”

Wait. Didn’t Perez Hilton point out on his Twitter feed that T-Mobile told him that he didn’t had to worry about backing up his data because they did it for him? I bet T-Mobile is wishing they never made that claim. Speaking of T-Mobile, I wonder how they and Danger/Microsoft are responding to this? Oh wait. They’re quoted in this article too:

Microsoft declined to comment on the lawsuit, but, a representative said on Wednesday that the company is “obviously very sorry for the inconvenience that this situation has caused Sidekick users, and we are working around the clock in an effort to recover and restore the data for any affected users. While it is still too early to say for sure, we announced on Monday that our engineering teams were increasingly optimistic.”

For its part, T-Mobile said in a statement that it “does not comment on pending litigation.”

Seeing as some users were getting their data back, I guess there’s reason for Microsoft to hope. But I suspect it won’t be enough for them to avoid this lawsuit I suspect.

Meanwhile, the mass defections to other carriers that have Blackberries and iPhones continues while this plays out in court. You can also expect that more lawsuits will be filed shortly as well.