Tag Archives: new zealand

Apple Delay International iPad Launch: “Late May Pre-Orders” [Updated]

There is no doubt that the iPad has been a remarkable success with selling over 500,000 of the WiFi models in the US alone in the first week. However this device has been longingly waited for by Apple’s international customers and news has just come out that the limited international launch will be delayed until late May.

Apple have said that:

“We will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders on Monday, May 10.”

This ‘magical and revoloutionary’ products popularity has been huge, with even Apple shocked by the number of units sold in the US. As Steve Jobs said, Apple just can’t produce iPads fast enough to meet with demand and therefore this news comes as no surprise.

However the New Zealand iPad page stays the same and it is evident that New Zealand will only see the iPad a while after the international late May release. TUAW have confirmed this in saying that

“The iPad’s UK page used to say “Coming late April.” Today that was changed to “Coming late May.” The good news is that Apple has set a pre-order date of May 10th in the UK, Canada, France, Australia and Germany.”

This is again dissapointing news for New Zealand and will most likely lead to hungry early adopters to order from US or Australia.

I have emailed Apple PR to see if there are any more details about the NZ launch and will update this if anything comes through.

UPDATE:

Apple have confirmed that this press release was only for those affected countries already getting the iPad and have no details on NZ launch.

Hi Anthony,

We have no details available for the launch of iPad in New Zealand at this time.

The alert sent overnight only affected the countries stated in our previous announcements, being Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK.

Kind regards, Fiona.

Also as a note this comes from an Australian representative rather than a US one.

Are you going to be getting an iPad and will you wait or source from another country? Let everyone know and comment!

Goodbye Xnet. Hello Orcon!

After months of discussing and debating we have finally made the move to Orcon. I couldn’t be happier. I will give you an outline on how hard it was to change to Orcon.

  1. Call Orcon, give them all the relevant details
  2. Wait a few days
  3. Congratulations, you are now with Orcon!

It was really that simple, nothing went unplanned, it worked perfectly. The hardest part was deciding whether to switch to them or not.

The reason we did decide to switch to them was the horrible and expensive service from Telecom (phone line) and the slow, unstable, annoying broadband from Xnet. Xnet was the main issue for us to switch. On the Geekzone Xnet forums there has been a lot of issues with Xnet in general but more to do with their slow international speed. During peak hours the internet with Xnet came to a grounding halt. YouTube videos took an age to load, nothing could be downloaded. It was practically dial up. Xnet went downhill from there, introducing a Torrent plan which would let users download 80gb of data at off peak hours (12am – 7am). Xnet have still failed to realise their mistake and have lost a lot of customers because of this. Over the past few months frequent outages have occurred, no not just normal ISP outages but the connection being lost every couple of weeks. However we signed up to Xnet for a totally different reason. Xnet was a revolutionary ISP, only charging for gb used, no excess $10 fee and a great customer service. While all those factors have remained they have really been trodden by shocking speed, outages and sheer annoyance.

So like many other Xnet users we spoke with our feet.

We couldn’t be happier that we are with Orcon. On the the Silver+ plan with a 25gb addon for $99.95 a month. This was the same price we paid with Xnet + Telecom but much faster speed, better reliability and more bandwidth.

I’ll give you a small comparison: Xnet vs Orcon: speed.

That’s a huge difference! Also remember that this is international speed, national is much faster. I advise all of you to change to Orcon if you are not satisfied with your current ISP. It’s very easy.

Enjoyed reading this post? If you want more you can subscribe to my RSS feed. Subscribe by email. Or if you want to know what I’m doing you can follow me on Twitter.

New Zealand first to get iPhone 3G

As mentioned on Engadget and my Twitter status New Zealand is going to be the first place in the world to get the very first 3G iPhone and I’m going to be the very first person in the whole world to have an iPhone (hopefully and maybe). Vodafone is set to open there stores at 12:01am on July 11 in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. I think this is great as New Zealand can finally be the first to get something (remember we never got the first iPhone).

For me the iPhone solves all my problems I have ever had with a phone. I agree with Apple favourite line “it just works”. As it does precisely that. It seems really expensive, especially for the average teenager but really it’s not. If you think about it lets say the iPhone 3G is $500 NZD on contract (Vodafone hasn’t said anything about price and the iPhone won’t be for prepay, will be covered in another blog post). In New Zealand dollars the average mobile phone is $200, the average camera $200, average iPod $350. That already adds up to $750 dollars. Plus the iPhone comes with awesome other features such as GPS, awesome mobile internet, 3G, email that actually works and much more. So it really is worth the money you pay for it.

For me it would be great only having to take one gadget around, my pockets are so full already with a phone, iPod and camera. It would be awesome to have it all in one and that’s exactly what it does.

Now Apple, you’ve done well with the iPhone, and you gave a retail store to Sydney, so when is Auckland’s turn?

Enjoyed reading this post? If you want more you can subscribe to my RSS feed. Subscribe by email. Or if you want to know what I’m doing you can follow me on Twitter.