Visiting Toronto’s newest downtown attraction: Ripley’s Aquarium of Canada

Text and photos by Corey Herscu

Complete pandemonium.

That’s essence of what it to experience Canada’s largest aquarium on a busy winter afternoon.

It starts with a two-hour line-up that ticket holders are forced to brave outside, one that they’ve been criticized  for in the past, and then continues inside the main foyer, and goes on throughout most of the entire 135,000-sq foot aquatic experience.

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Acer targeting 7-inch and 8-inch tablet space with new Iconia models

The hottest space in tablets is the 8-inch and under form factor right now and we're going to see a lot of new models. take for example Acer's new Iconia A-1 and B-1 models which challenge exisiting tablets in the 7-inch and the 7.8-inch category right now. Sporting Intel Atom processors (another trend we're expecting to see continue past CES), 1GB or RAM and a price tag of $180, the 7.9-inch Iconia A1 should be good for 7 hours of battery life. The cheaper B1 has the 7-inch screen, runs Android on a 1.3GHz dual-core processor and will cost around $130.

Source: Engadget

BlackBerry, Alicia Keys to part ways starting Jan 30th

In a not so unexpected move, BlackBerry has announced that it is parting ways with global creative director-cum spokesperson Alicia Keys after barely year of collaborating.

Keys was introduced by ex-CEO Thorsten Heins during last year's BlackBerry 10 event which ushered in the Z10 and BlackBerry's new OS. With BlackBerry focusing on enterprise and slowly retreating from the consumer end of the market, a spokesperson of Keys' caliber and popularity is no longer needed. 14-time Grammy Award winner Keys appeared in various BlackBerry events and even integrated her Z10 into her stage routine during live shows. BlackBerry has often used musicians to promote its products, previous endorsers include DJ Diplo and The Martinez Brothers but it was recently revealed that they turned down Justin Bieber early in his career because they thought he was 'just a fad'. Bieber wanted $200,000.00 and 20 devices to be RIM's spokesperson.

webOS is back in LG's new SmartTV

Twitter's leakmeister @evleaks kicks off the new year with a pre-CES reveal of what LG's webOS-powered SmartTV will look like. The photo shows off a sleek, nearly-frameless HDTV with a new piano-style interface which is supposedly running on webOS. For those of your that don't remember, webOS was Palm's mobile operating system that powered their Pre smartphones and TouchPad tablets before HP chewed them up, swallowed them whole  for 1.2 billion and regurgitated the promising mobile OS into little more than a patent stockpile. HP was thinking of putting webOS as a secondary OS on all its PC's printers and other devices before it sold certain aspects to LG who promised to make better use of the OS. It's going to be interesting to see where all of this goes.

Source: @evleaks via Twitter