Latest News

Ted Rogers who turned 75 in May was admitted to a Toronto hospital for an “existing cardiac condition”. As a result, Alan Horn who is currently chairman of Rogers’ board will step in as acting CEO.

With this news the ongoing speculation of who the successor will be has started up again. Possible candidates are President & COO Nadir Mohamed and Edward Rogers )who is Ted’s son and in charge of Rogers Cable). We read an incredible story a few months ago about how Ted Rogers build Rogers into a major communications compnay in Canada. Read it here

Rogers officially informed us yesterday that the new flip phone from BlackBerry – the Pearl 8220 – will be available for purchase on November 4th.

A treat awaited us in our e-mail with a link to some pics of an already purchased 8220 from a Future Shop located in Ottawa by “ranxoran“. From the look of the store receipt it was purchased outright for $349.99 and with taxes the total came to $395.49. This was also available at a 3-year price of $49.99.

Here are the pics:

We got a nice little Halloween treat in our e-mail this afternoon. An official e-mail stating that Rogers will have the BlackBerry Pearl 8220 available on Tuesday, November 4th!

This has been heavily leaked and long anticipated… but finally the first flip phone from BlackBerry will be in our hands. Here is the image that came with our e-mail:

The HTC Touch Diamond was officially announced today and you can check it out on their site here and here – we had a one sent to us and you can see the unboxing here. The site called “Bell Interface” has all the “bells & whistles” needed to understand what the Diamond is capable of… basically an online user guide for the new user interface they created.

Want the BlackBerry Storm like most Canadians do? Well BlackBerrySync has received an update on the anticipated release date for the TELUS BlackBerry Storm 9530: November 17th. More here

OtterBox is set to announce a new set of “Impact Serices” cases for the BlackBerry Bold and Apple iPhone 3G.

With all OtterBox cases, they will protect your device from scratches and bumps. The price will be $19.99 (US) and we will have a review soon.

More here

Bell has certainly make some massive progress over the last 100 days, and they’re looking to make even greater strides with launching their much leaked “Rollover Plans” tomorrow…

Launching ahead of schedule (well leaked schedule), we are not sure of what the plans will actually be, but Boy Genius Ninjas reported these numbers that include all rollover plans to include unlimited evenings and weekends (starting at 9pm). There are a number of price scales that start at $30 for 300 minutes,  $40 plans for 600 minutes, $45 for 400 minutes with email, $55 for 700 minutes with email, $60 for 400 minutes with unlimited data… and finally $70 for 700 minutes with unlimited data.

Also, our Ninja sent us are a couple new e-mail plans:
$40: unlimited browser, unlimited full track music (?), unlimited messaging.
$50: unlimited browser, unlimited full track music (?), unlimited messaging, media pack included, Unlimited GPS.

The catch is that the above new e-mail plan has to be purchased with the BlackBerry Curve or HTC Diamond.

Imagine combining the rollover plans and the above e-mail plans… More to come soon.

If you’ve been holding out for an even further price drop of the BlackBerry Bold… the pre-holiday blitz will be very good to you! The upcoming release of the Storm seems to have the Rogers Bold getting scared as Best Buy Mobile has dropped the price to $199.99 on a 3-year plan…and they are also throwing in a $50 Gift Card. The offer is good until November 27th.

Koodo Mobile is set to release the very text friendly LG KEYBO. This device was first announced way back in August with Telus and also heavily used in the LG Canadian Texting Championships.

The KEYBO has a  QWERTY keyboard, 2 mega pixel camera, music player and dedicated gaming keys, 1 GB memory card, stereo speakers, and expandable memory up to 8GB, weighs 120 grams, with dimensions of 102mm x 54mm x 16.5mm. This will only be available in Black.

When this officially launches, Best Buy Mobile will be selling this on the tab for $74.99 and they also sweeten the pot by throwing in a $100 LG gift card. Now there’s a deal that will help you loose those landlline lumps!

We did a video review when it first came out with Telus which can be seen here.

We love Best Buy and Future Shop Fridays! As the upcoming holiday season approaches we will start seeing a slew of new phones come out. Today we noticed the upcoming Samsung M540 TAAG(?) from Telus.

This looks to be the Samsung Rant that was released back in September by Sprint in the US. The M540 will is a side that has a full QWERTY keyboard, 2 megapixel camera , GPS, 2.1″ screen, weighs in at 130 grams and will be available at Best Buy Mobile for the following prices:

3-year plan: $29.99
2-year plan: $79.99
1-year plan: $179.99
Month-to-Month or Outright: $249.99

More to come soon!