Like it or not, big bad Rogers will be the exclusive provider of Apple's beautiful and magnificent and world-changing iPhone, and as each week goes by it's getting harder and harder to mitigate disgust for the former with adoration for the latter. It was nice, then, to find out that Bell turned their Norm MacDonald–voiced beaver into something truly great: a great big middle finger to Rogers (and Apple). Bell's ad in this week's NOW......

Now, normally our coverage of anything Rogers is best downed with a tall glass of Haterade, but Toronto's technophiles and status-hungry business execs have reason to give thanks today to the Evil Empire, for the most anticipated gadget of the last gazillion years is to finally land in our fair city: Apple's iPhone. In a curt press release this morning, Rogers announced that a deal had been conclusively inked with Apple and the device......

Photo by Denmar from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Canadian telcos are masters at exploiting customer tolerance limits—when you need a mobile device and are locked into a contract with few alternative options, you're pretty much forced to accept the beatdown levied by one of the three majors. And the carriers benefit greatly by confusing customers, whether it be via despicable "system access fees" or by giving meaningless, unhelpful names to monthly rate plans, like......

Have you ever wondered what you could learn from a computer pioneer? You'll have your chance to find out when Michael Dell rolls into town for a free speaking engagement at Convocation Hall later this month. Okay, so Dell isn't exactly a pioneer: he's famous not for inventing anything, but merely for improving the process of assembling a bunch of parts into a serviceable computer, shipping it somewhere, and making a boatload of money while......

Apple advertises its 8 GB MP3 player––some device called the "I Pod Mini"––as having enough capacity for 2,000 songs. Rogers, on the other hand, is marketing its 8 GB Sony Ericsson W580i MP3-playing phone as having the capacity for 10,000 songs! 10,000! That's no problem if you like all your music under a minute and a half, in mono, and encoded at an AM radio–quality bitrate. Otherwise, you might be a little disappointed––you know, more......

Well, it's about time. Two years after launching downloadable television shows south of the border, Apple has finally flipped the switch here, albeit with a dearth of content. Single television episodes are available via iTunes for $1.99, and full seasons range from about $10–$30. Most of the shows currently available are for domestic productions, like CTV's Degrassi: The Next Generation and the CBC series Little Mosque on the Prairie, but non-Canadian shows, like South......

Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Once a week, the editors of each site—from LAist to Londonist—compile some of their most interesting posts into a brief blurb. It's Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse, and it appears, across the network, every Sunday. Austinist attended a town hall meeting about proposed noise ordinances that could undermine the city's future as the Live Music Capital of the World, and lamented the possible loss of......

Celebrating its fifth anniversary, the Toronto Japanese Short Film Festival opens its doors tonight and runs until Sunday at the Innis Town Hall (2 Sussex Avenue). The theme of this year’s festival is “Life is short, work hard!” and is explored throughout the festival’s programming, beginning tonight at 6.30 p.m. with the Momo (Japanese for “peach”) program. The program begins with a couple of hilarious shorts from Japanese comedy duo the Rahmens, The Japanese......

Photo by Simon Chambers from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. For a change of pace, Torontoist decided to do a liquid-based challenge for this edition. Being fall, and since we enjoy being contextually appropriate, we decided to head down to Cider Town for some of the good old brown and tangy. We stuck with the non-alcoholic version, and tried to test out both some of the "home-made" and the café procured varieties. We have to......

Few companies inspire the kind of product lust that Apple does, and it's no secret that Mac users can be somewhat evangelical about the company from Cupertino. To many Apple fans in Canada, it's sheer torture that TV shows and movies aren't yet available in the Canadian iTunes Music Store, or that the iPhone is taking so damn long to cross the border. In the United States, the iPhone has been the must-have tech......

Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Once a week, the editors of each site—from LAist to Londonist—compile some of their most interesting posts into a brief blurb. It's Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse, and it appears, across the network, every Sunday. Londonist got the big scoop of the week with what may be the first images of notorious street artist Banksy in action. They also got on a runaway train without......

With a little over twelve hours to go until this year's Capture the Flag, Lori and I are feeling anxious and excited. Not entirely sure the 3,000 glowsticks we've purchased will be enough, not confident that we will be able to handle the crowd, and not certain that the game will go smoothly at all, there are a lot of things to worry about. We've spent the week calling up wholesale companies in the......

Today Apple offered us a refresh of their entire iPod line, making us want to blindly toss our money at the company once again. One Torontonian, however, is getting some coin thrown her way—big time. Indie darling Leslie Feist has found her track "1234" at the core of the new worldwide iPod nano television spot. Even better, Apple is touting the device's new ability to play video, and prominently features the "1234" clip, directed......

A lot happens in and around Toronto, but we can only write about so much in a week. Here's the best of the rest, in a new weekly feature we're calling Superfluist. Superfluist will appear every Friday night. First a monkey escaped. Then, elephants did. And now, a bear has! Animals are apparently not big fans of being captive. Weird, right?The semi-famous Enrique Inglesias was at MuchMusic.This weekend (starting tomorrow morning at 11 a.m.) is......

Two Steps Back, the eighth emerging artists show at Interaccess opened last week. Interaccess has been on a bit of a roll of late, having just hosted a workshop with Second Front, the premiere performance art troupe of Second Life earlier this week. This most recent edition of the show playfully orbits the themes of failure and obsolescence. Considering the defining moment of this summer has been an Apple product launch, this mischievous attitude......

Michael Moore’s much anticipated Sicko hits, and having seen it, we can say it’s not particularly essential for Canadian viewers to watch, unless you want to feel smug about our lovely health care system, or slightly surprised that it only takes an hour or so in London (Ontario) to be seen in an emergency room. Yes, the film is chock-a-block with anecdotal evidence, and it’s probably to the film’s fault that, as usual, Moore......

For his entry to Touch Up Toronto, Alden R. Cudanin sent us this photo of the south side of College just east of Bathurst from about 1920, doctored to include the now-ubiquitous iPod ads. Of course, back then, in addition to billboard advertising, Apple also targeted the ever-growing praxinoscope-owning demographic, their ads featuring shadowed men and women dancing the Charleston to the latest Gershwin (or, occasionally, Daft Punk) joint. Original photo from the City......

Useful human-computer interaction (HCI) interfaces haven't advanced too much since Xerox PARC experimented with the desktop-and-mouse motif, commercialized and made famous by Apple in the 1980s. Luckily, some brainiacs at The University of Toronto's Dynamic Graphics Project are helping Minority Report-style science fiction become a plausible reality. Grad student Xiang Cao and professor Ravin Balakrishnan are working on some fascinating HCI techniques using a pen input and a handheld projector. The device projects a......

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs. It was a rollercoaster ride of emotions this week at DCist. Like the rest of country, we were floored by the news of so many dead coming out of Virginia Tech, and with so many of the victims and their relatives from the D.C. area, we felt it important to pay tribute......

Spring is when we get busy here in the Ist-A-Verse. Very busy. But, after staying bundled-up indoors all winter, it's nice for us to be out, about, and collecting things to write about for you. Here's a glimpse at what's been keeping your favorite citybloggers busily away from home and out of bed. For LAist, strong winds attacked LA on the same day the Feds raided the Crips. Not to fear, though: the Japanese version......

We don't know about where you are, but it seems like spring can't decide whether or not to happen. Some days are warm, some days are cold, and sometimes you aren't sure which. Baseball may have started up (and soccer/football winding down) but it still seems cold out there. Unless it's not. Anyway, onto the -ists. Austinist happily anticipated fall's Austin City Limits, even though they're not fully recovered from South By Southwest. In other......

We here in the Ist-A-Verse know that we're sensational, but it's very rare that we get a chance to be sensationalistic. This week, we've decided to have ourselves a little fun and try our hand at tacky tabloid headlines, using nothing more than our favorite posts from this week. Torontoist Special Report: Rosie to Trump: "Fire 300 Bicyclists for Fraud!" On DCist: Students Go Wild for Slogans, Secrets and Sexual Harassment The action was thick......

Each week, Torontoist chooses the most interesting cases from the Toronto Police Service crime blotter. All charges are alleged until proven under law. • The big story this week was the arrest of six kids for the murder of a 17-year-old boy in the Flemingdon Park area. On July 15, 2006, the victim was stripped and assaulted over several hours by a group of people outside a housing complex on Grenoble Drive, finally succumbing to......

Jim Jones was not your typical self-proclaimed messiah. The man preached love for all races and classes, freedom of speech and socialism through Christianity. In 1978, Jones and more than 900 followers, known as Peoples Temple, moved from California to Guyana. They were going to build the ideal society. Dubbed Jonestown, after Jones himself, it was to be a utopia for the disenfranchised; a place where believers of all races and classes could lead self-sufficient......

Austinist gets arty with an interactive guide to SXSW, loved some local art galleries and a new art exhibit and lamented the possible loss of "Friday Night Lights" production to New Mexico. Bostonist was happy they finally found an Anna Nicole Smith connection to their fair city and that an Apple Store was opening up. They were less happy that new rules have been established limiting underage shows and that their Governor is spending a......

Try as you might, you can't look anywhere in our city without seeing some sort of ad for Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista. Alongside an unusually aggressive advertising campaign through more traditional methods, the company also went all out and paid for an elaborate ice house in Dundas Square. As the corporation should have expected, the backlash towards the over-the-top promotion began almost right away: there were the obvious jokes about "freezing"; impromptu......

Almost 20 years ago, in 1988, over 300 scientists and policy-makers from 46 different countries and organizations came together to discuss the crisis of climate change in Toronto. It was called “The Toronto Conference,” and their final statement began with the following sentence: "Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment, whose ultimate consequence could be second only to a global nuclear war." In other words, they were a little concerned. At the......

Drake, you ho, this is all your fault. The Ontario Municipal Board has approved a high-rise residential project on Queen Street West at 48 Abell Street, just steps from the Gladstone and everything hipsters cherish about Toronto's arts scene. Developers intend to build 7 condos in total with affordable housing, and the ratio of "normal people" to "artists with cool hair" will be thrown into upheaval. Unfortunately, there's not much that we or neighbourhood-preservation......

Apple unveils the iPhone. Entire bunches of interwebs go nuts over possibilities created by what is, when you get right down to it, just another fancy cellphone. Seriously, this isn't the iPod. This isn't a new class of product. This is at best a slight improvement on existing things to which we already had access. The iPhone will not do your hair, manage your diet or make you generally sexier. (Okay, it might make......

Jagshemash! Borat is a hit. It's getting rave reviews, grossing millions, and definitely the most quotable thing we've seen in ages. But Borat seems to have missed most of the -ist cities, and we were all wondering how the film would have been different if he'd made his way around the world on the -ist tour. In Shanghai, Borat would be observing Inane Learnings of Penis Photos for Make Benefit Glorious Flat World of......