Blackberry Users Want To Jump Ship?

Market research firm Crowd Science has a very interesting blog post that makes the following claims based on a survey they just did. After surveying Blackberry users, they found that:

• 40% of survey respondents said they plan replace their Blackberry handset for an iPhone
• 32% of survey respondents said they’d be getting a Nexus One
• 28% of survey respondents said that they’d keep their Blackberry

If you’re Jim Balsillie or Mike Lazaridis of RIM, you have to look at this and be a bit concerned. Now there’s a ton of other interesting info in this survey, so it’s worth a read. But clearly Apple and Google are clearly winning hearts and minds. And that has to be a red flag to RIM.

Google Nexus One Now Available For AT&T And Rogers Customers [UPDATED]

For those of you in Canada and those Americans who don’t like T-Mobile who wanted to get a Nexus One, I have some good news for you. If you surf to the Nexus One ordering page, you now have the option to order it for AT&T and Rogers. Since they’re unlocked, you just drop in a SIM card with the right data plan and you’re good to go. Here’s the official announcement from the Nexus One Blog:

Starting today, an additional version of the Nexus One is available from the Google web store that is compatible with AT&T’s 3G network. This new model can be purchased as an unlocked device without a service plan. In addition to AT&T’s 3G network, this device will also run on Rogers Wireless in Canada. And like the first version of the Nexus One, it can be used with most GSM operators globally.

So it now seems that more people can get some Nexus One love from Google. Although I have to wonder how AT&T and Rogers feel about strolling in and doing this. AT&T? Rogers? Care to comment?

Oh yes. Perhaps this will help Nexus One sales as they have been pathetic less than stellar according to some reports.

UPDATE: Rogers has a post on Redboard with their thoughts. They seem to be pleased. They also note that paid apps are coming to the Android store for Canadian customers. Although according to The Boy Genius, Android users on Bell and Telus are being shown no love.

Dell Suing Suppliers Over Price Fixing…. Wow!

I’m guessing that Dell was feeling that they were being screwed, as they are now suing Hitachi, Sharp, Toshiba, HannStar, and Seiko over LCD price fixing. Reuters is reporting that Dell has not decided on what damages it will seek, but you can bet it will be a very big dollar amount. It also doesn’t help that LCD companies have been nailed for this sort of thing before. Of course at the end of this circus, the lawyers will win and consumers won’t see any benefit from this as I highly doubt that prices of Dell hardware will drop if they win.

You gotta love how this stuff works.

VMWare Fusion Thrashed By Parallels Desktop In Terms Of Graphics Performance…. But Does It Matter?

Frequent readers will recall that I did a head to head comparison of VMWare Fusion 3 and Parallels Desktop 5 a while ago and I didn’t really name a winner as it depended on your needs and I didn’t have an objective way of measuring the two products. Good thing that MacTech did that for me when it comes to the graphics performance of the two products, and they’ve posted a video with their results:

The above video has 2 MacBook Pros running Windows XP in virtual machines on Mac OS 10.6.2 via VMWare Fusion 3 and Parallels Desktop 5. The winner? Parallels Desktop 5. But before you run out and get Parallels Desktop 5 to play Crysis, you should note this. I still wouldn’t use a virtual machine to play video games as you’re going to get better performance from using Boot Camp which runs XP, Vista, or Windows 7 without the overhead of a virtual machine. But if you need to run some sort of a PC based application on your Mac that requires 3D support, it might be worth giving Parallels Desktop 5 a try. Oh yeah, I should note that they recently kicked out a update that increases the speed of virtual machines as well as adding Google Chrome support, not to mention a ton of other improvements.

Google To Pull The Plug In China?

If you believe the Wall Street Journal [Paywall, copy the title into Google, click search and click the link to read the full text], that’s apparently on the table in Google HQ:

A person familiar with situation said on Saturday that Google is likely to take action within weeks. Separately, Chinese authorities on Friday told local news Web sites that Google’s Chinese site is likely to close and that, if it does, the news sites will be required to use only official accounts of the situation, rather than publish stories from anywhere else, according to a person familiar with the order.

You’ll recall that Google and China have been butting heads over censorship and the fact that some Gmail accounts that belonged to some human rights activists were apparently hacked by someone within China. Both sides have been talking, but it seems that the endgame is near and Google is willing to walk away from 36% of the search engine market in that country. Right now China doesn’t seem to be too bothered by it, but one wonders if that will change if Google does pull the plug.

Stay tuned, this is going to get very interesting.

Bye Bye Bell! – Part 2 [UPDATED]

As you likely read in my last entry, my wife and I have decided to dump Bell Canada as our home phone provider and switch to Teksavvy since we get our Internet from them and they have excellent customer service. A reader e-mailed me to ask why I put a such an emphasis on the latter. The reason is simple: Given that there’s any number of companies that can supply you with the same services (in this case, home phone), the only thing that sets a company apart from its competitors is the quality of their customer service. We’ve had great experiences with Teksavvy thus far, and we are hoping that continues with their home phone service.

My wife and I called them just after 11AM today and we were on hold for 5 minutes before we got to an agent. Not a big deal as I’ve been on hold as long as 15 or 20 minutes with Bell, but it doesn’t help with the first impression that the customer gets. When we got to an agent, the process to set up everything was smooth. He explained everything in detail and answered all of our questions. From start to finish the process took about 15 minutes and we’d be getting an e-mail sometime today to confirm all the details. Overall, the process was very civilized. We have a date of March 30th set to make the switch and the Teksavvy rep was 99% sure that it would go smoothly. One big plus to this, Teksavvy is going to port our existing phone number across to them and cancel our Bell service for us. That is very cool as our last call to Bell and their attempts to keep our business were just a pain in the you know where.

We’ll report back on the 30th and let you know if everything went smoothly or not. We’ll also post updates as to if anything “interesting” happens between now and then. My feeling is that I’m about to hear from Bell Canada with a desperate attempt to keep our business.

UPDATE: Something that I forgot to mention, Teksavvy Home Phone includes $0.029/a minute long distance in Canada and the US. In my mind, that’s a very competitive rate as we occasionally have the need to dial long distance.

Rogers Increasing 911 Fees For Some Of Their Cell Phone Users

A tip from a reader pointed me towards a National Post Tech Desk Blog posting where they are reporting that the cost of 911 access is going up on for some Rogers cell phone users:

On April 12, Rogers, the country’s biggest wireless carrier by subscribers, [external link] is hiking its so-called “9-1-1 Emergency Access Fee” to $0.75 from $0.50.

A spokeswoman for Rogers said the hike was “in line” with rates found across the industry.

Okay, but the blog post goes on to say this:

Rivals BCE Inc. and Telus Corp. continue to charge a carrier fee for 911 access for old accounts, but both axed the fees and even system access charges in November for new subscribers as a way to appease customers faced with more choice in the market and cheaper deals elsewhere.

The removal of the fees provide a modest saving which is follows the general downward trend in pricing over the last several quarters as competition has intensified. But Rogers has been steadfast in holding the line.

Like Bell and Telus, it dropped its system access fee last November but replaced it with a “Government Regulatory Recovery Fee.” The new ranges from about $2.50 to $3.50 depending on province.

Now to be fair, there is a a way to avoid this. All you have to do is sign up for a plan that includes the previously mentioned Government Regulatory Recovery Fee. That’s something that I’ve discussed before.

What do I think of this? Two words come to mind: Cash Grab.

I wonder what Rogers customers who are affected by this think? Please leave a comment and share your views.

Bye Bye Bell! – Part 1

It’s time to dump Bell as my home phone provider.

After our recent experience with their customer service (and no, I don’t care that Bell is trying to improve on that), my wife and I decided that it was time for Bell to go. Frequent readers will recall that we did a test drive of Rogers Home Phone and found it to be a very good product. But the fact that it relied on a battery that lasted 6 hours at most bothered us. Plus we have DSL Internet access which meant that we would have to either get a dry loop to keep DSL or switch to a non DSL Internet provider. Given that we like Teksavvy our DSL provider as they have excellent customer service, the odds of us switching Internet providers was zero. That’s when we remembered that Teksavvy also offers Home Phone service. We looked at the pricing and we could save just over $12 by switching to them. The only downside is that they use Bell copper to deliver service as they are a Bell wholesaler, so Bell still gets money from us. But they’d get much less money from us and we’d be dealing with a company that delivers excellent customer service. That was good enough for us to switch. All we had to do is first confirm that we’re not under a contract with Bell.

That turned out to be entertaining.

My wife called Bell and confirmed that we’re not under contract, which meant we could switch home phone providers at will. Then the person in whatever call center in India that Bell has contracted (as the person was clearly Indian) who clearly clued in that we were looking to dump Bell then offered my wife a deal of $34.94 a month for 6 months if we agreed to a 12 month contract (which would only save us $5 a month). She declined the offer and tried to end the call. That’s when he offered to transfer her to the “loyalty” department. I guess that department has better deals than he can offer. She refused that too. He also tried to sell her TV and Internet which she also refused. In fact with all his attempts to offer us deals to keep us as a customer, it took over 5 minutes for my wife to get off the phone.

Talk about aggressive. I wonder what Bell will do when we actually pull the plug on them? Not that it matters, because we’ll be another lost customer to them.

On Monday we call Teksavvy. I’ll post about what happens.

Microsoft Loses Another i4i Appeal

The BBC is reporting that Microsoft has lost another appeal in the i4i patent circus. For those of you keeping score at home,  this is the second appeal that Microsoft has lost. But of course they could always appeal again and this circus could continue for some time to come. But it might be best if they just pay the $240 million or so that they owe, fix Word so it is no longer an issue as they’re clearly capable of doing and move on. But that would be too easy, right?

Rogers Advertises For Wind Mobile…. Oops!

I was browsing one of Rogers Twitter feeds and noted this request for feedback on their Avatar. So I clicked on it, then clicked on the twitpic link and came across this:

You’ll notice the Wind Mobile Ad on the right hand side. Rogers isn’t in control of the adverts that appear on twitpic, but this ad did pop up a lot when I refreshed the page (like 4 of every 10 tries). So I’m guessing that out of the 198 views on this page (as I type this), some of those eyeballs saw an advert for Wind Mobile.

If you’re Rogers, that’s gotta suck.