Carrier hiccups giving buyers grief on iPhone 5 launch day

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

We've been through iPhone launches before so one would think that Canadian carriers would have figured out how to compensate for the demand of new signups.

Walking through the downtown core today we saw that a Telus store had closed its doors to customers because of a nationwide outage that hit at 7:30 in the morning and that hasn't yet been resolved. The Telus outage seems to have affected their website with users being unable to access their accounts. The issue was resolved late in the afternoon.

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Nokia lays the smackdown on competing smartphone map services

Nokia Canada has just posted a graphic on Facebook comparing its mapping service against its competition. Citing the features coming to the still unreleased, unpriced and unavailable Lumia 920 versus the Android-powered Samsung Galaxy SIII (out since June) and the Apple iPhone 5 (out today). Nokia has had a head start in the mapping department since it purchased Navteq in 2007 for $8.1 billion.

Source: Nokia Canada

BlackBerry outage hits Europe, Mideast and Africa

Research In Motion reported a BlackBerry outage in parts of Europe, Mideast and Africa early this morning through its Twitter and Facebook accounts. This is not the way the BlackBerry maker wants to be remembered on the biggest product launch of the year, rival Apple's iPhone 5 begins selling in a few hours.

"We are currently experiencing a BlackBerry service issue impacting some users in Europe, Middle East and Africa," the company said in a statement.

BlackBerry says it is working urgently to fix the service.

"All relevant support teams are working to resolve the issue. We apologise to any customers who may be affected."

iFixit goes down under to teardown iPhone 5

It is a yearly tradition that the fine folks at iFixit get their hands on one of the first iPhones on launch day and take it apart bit-by-bit. This year they've gone to Oz and turned their pentalobe screwdrivers on the new iPhone 5. The teardown is actually in progress as i write this but they've discovered a number of interesting things like you need a suction cup to get the display removed and that replacing cracked screens is going to be easier than ever. Not for the squamish, at least it is informational.

Source: iFixit