Hasta La Gadget!

Motorola is “ready to go on a hiring spree” in Waterloo, the home of BlackBerry HQ, according to a new report from the Financial Post. The Google-owned maker of smartphones already has an existing, small office in the heart of one of Canada’s most important tech hubs, but plans to build a proper, full-fledged engineering team in the area.

BlackBerry is going to be shedding a lot of talent, very quickly, as it plans to lay off around 4,500 people in the near future. Motorola wouldn’t tell the FP that those layoffs specifically had anything to do with its decision to expand in Waterloo, but did comment that “it’s not always easy to find places that have significant tech talent in a variety of areas, but especially mobile.” Given BlackBerry’s focus, it’s very likely he’s referring to the abundance of engineers located in the region with smartphone experience.

Waterloo is already an area with high demand for engineering talent. The startup ecosystem in the region is vibrant, and those young companies all need engineers to build their products. VC investment is rolling in for companies in the area, which means more competition than ever for graduates of the University of Waterloo, one of the most highly respected engineering schools in the world. Other sizeable tech companies have also expressed newfound interest in the area, with Square announcing just last week it would open offices in BlackBerry’s backyard.

Google has other interests in the area, too. Its office in Waterloo has contributed considerably to the development of Chrome and Chrome OS, and there’s a specific focus on mobile for its team there, including the mobile counterparts of Gmail and Google Docs. Considering the Google Waterloo team’s focus on mobile software, it makes sense that Google would want its Motorola mobile hardware unit nearby.

BlackBerry and its ongoing demise (yes, I’m totally comfortable calling it that at this point) is not going to be a great thing for the Waterloo region by any means, and a lot of people are going to suffer as a result of the company’s collapse. But this move by Motorola shows that the core of what makes it such a successful tech hub remains intact, and will call other big players to fill the void the smartphone pioneer is leaving behind.

Rogers promised that October 1st would be a grand day for its LTE expansion plans, and we’re now learning that it might have been underpromising to overdeliver later. The carrier just flicked the 4G switch for 18 cities and regions, or eight more territories than it had promised just two weeks ago. Most of the coverage still focuses on the southern tip of Ontario, including London, the Oshawa area and RIM’s hometown of Waterloo, but there’s a much more trans-Canada bent to the official deployment. Western cities like Saskatoon and Victoria now fit into Rogers’ LTE map beyond a previously announced Edmonton, while the Quebec rollout is going past Quebec City to include Sherbrooke and Trois-Rivières. All told, the one day of growth is enough to supply Rogers LTE to almost 60 percent of Canada’s population — a convenient figure when one of the year’s more important LTE smartphones just became available less than two weeks prior.

[Thanks, Jon]

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, RIM

Rogers LTE hits 18 new regions, delivers speedy data in Saskatoon originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Oct 2012 02:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BlackBerry users who routinely feel left out while friends share retro pictures of coffee and pastries on Instagram will soon have their own BB alternative. Slides released by N4BB reveal that a Scalado–powered photo editing app has been baked into BB10, which is due early next year. The software will let you tweak and enhance your casual snaps, but also offer a carousel of aged filters you can drag onto shots of your own taste-appropriate snack goods. After the break we’ve got an early hands-on with the app from the folks at Crackberry, which walks you through a non-working prototype.

Continue reading BlackBerry 10 gets homespun picture editor to reduce Instagram-envy (video)

Filed under: Cellphones, Digital Cameras

BlackBerry 10 gets homespun picture editor to reduce Instagram-envy (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Jul 2012 04:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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