July 21st, 2008, 6 Comments »
AdHack is running a new assignment on Rogers and the iPhone:
Rogers has been criticized for its underwhelming advertising. When the iPhone was announced they had nothing on their website until a teaser appeared. AdHack member Brendan Wilson though the teaser was “lame.” Doesn’t a great device deserve better? We think we can do better. Yeah — we know you can do better!
We call this challenge Assignment #9: Create the iPhone ad that Rogers should have used to launch and promote the iPhone in Canada. You can praise it, you can hate on it. The choice is yours. Remember to tag your submission with “Assignment #9″ when you upload!
Here’s what I came up with:
It references the fact that Rogers promised an early bird breakfast to those standing in line. But Travis says “the only food was granola bars at about 10 or 11 a.m., but only enough for about one bar for every three people”.
Thus far, I’m quite happy with my iPhone. I’ve never had a GPS-enabled device before, and I find identifying my location kind of existentially thrilling. The UI is everything people say it is, and I can certainly type on it way faster than I could text on my old phone. I haven’t really discovered any must-have apps yet. I just read about AirMe, which may become my Flickr uploader of choice.
Complaints? I want a one-tap (the iPhone term for ‘click’) means of returning to the audio I was playing from elsewhere in the UI, or from when the device is in sleep mode. More importantly, the battery life is kind of pitiful. If you’re using data functions on the phone, you pretty much have to plug it in every day. I can live with that, but it’s not really satisfactory.
UPDATE: Rob from Techvibes asked me to pimp his Ad Hack commission.
6 Comments »
April 27th, 2008, 30 Comments »
Three years ago (almost to the day), I asked you, my dear readers, what cell phone I should buy:
I own the Honda Civic of cell phones. It works fine, and doesn’t break when I drop it. I rarely use my phone–I may go a whole week without making or receiving a call on it.
I bought the very ordinary Sony Ericsson Z600. It’s been fine, but I need to move up.
The biggest new requirement is that I need to send and receive email. So the input mechanism–keyboard, stylus, touch screen, whatever, needs to work well.
Everything else is negotiable. I don’t plan to record video with my phone, and I’ll take whatever still camera comes with the thing.
I could get an iPhone, I guess, but I really don’t want to spend any time hacking the thing to make it work in Canada. If setup and maintenance is pain-free, it’s an option.
So, what mobile solution would you recommend? Blackberry? Just to be clear, under no circumstances will I be wearing this thing on my hip, so smaller is better.
On a related note, should I stick with Fido? Do all mobility providers suck equally? Does anybody offer a real edge in data plans?
I’m tres ignorant on all things mobile, so I’ll take any advice you can offer.
UPDATE: I visited this page from Rogers Wireless in both Safari and Firefox on my MacBook. They get a big Browser Compatibility Fail.
30 Comments »
April 9th, 2007, 6 Comments »
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about how much the current pricing structure for Canadian mobile data access blows. I managed to spend CAN $112 for 3 MB of data. Both James and Boris link to Thomas Purves’s chart that shows how absurd current Canadian mobile data pricing is (click for larger image):
I was mostly writing this post to encourage you, my dear readers, to Digg this story. However, in the time I took to write this entry, it made it to the front page of Digg. So, mission accomplished without our help.
UPDATE: You know one thing that bugs me about the Digg community? Their apparent lack of a sense of humour. They seem to take vicious delight in digging down (or burying, if you like) any humorous comments. It seems to reinforce the stereotype of geeks as overly-serious poindexters.
At least Slashdot has the ‘funny’ category for such comments. Comparatively, Digg has simplified the user moderation on comments, but they’ve lost some important diversity along the way.
6 Comments »
