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With all the attention around certain robot and fruit themed mobile gadgets these days, let’s not forget Canada’s own Research In Motion. RIM pretty much invented the smartphone. Currently RIM continues to pile on marketshare relative to all comers thanks in large part to a laser-like focus on solid mobile experience design.

So we’re really excited that the MEIC* has landed two top experience designers from RIM to speak at this month’s MEIC event. If you are in Toronto, highly recommended. Here are the details.:

MEIC 7
OCAD Auditorium
100 McCaul St
Friday, May 28 at 4:00 pm

DESIGNING THE BLACKBERRY EXPERIENCE

Join Research In Motion’s Joey Benedek and Wesley Yun as they talk about the growing importance of the user experience at RIM — and the challenge of finding the right talent to fuel ongoing growth.

DEMOs: MEIC Research + Prototyping Presentations

• Mark Green, UOIT, Educational Apps for the iPhone: Initial Design Explorations
• Jim Brown, Admeris
• C. Alex De Freitas, University of Auckland, NZ; Gabe Sawhney, EchoMobile
• Denis Coyne, Nightingale Creative; Adam Clare, WeroCreative
• Vivek Shivhare, University of Waterloo; Ted Brunt, marblemedia

Tickets are free but limited, register here

St Catherines On, May 23 2010 (fastest of 1 test run):

Toronto On, May 24 2010 (fastest of 3 test runs):

Slowest of 3 Toronto test runs (all in the space of 10min): 4.5Mbit down, 0.68Mbit up

Tested with Rogers ZTE MF668 HSPA “21″ Mbps HSPA+ stick

That first test at an amazing 13Mb/s down and 1.22Mb/s is significantly faster than most people’s wired connectivity (at least in bandwidth if not quite latency). If you were doubting if there was any effective difference between standard 7.2Mb HSPA and the 21.6Mb HSPA+ variety, here is your proof. You will see these speeds only with a rocket stick, tethering is always going to be limited to some fraction of 7.2MBs which is currently the fasted rated speed of any handset in Canada.

For best results, it seems to help a little if you test the network in beautiful weather on a statutory holiday. It may also help if you test it in a municipality like St Catharines On, where you could well be the only one for miles around actually hitting any local cell tower for it’s full available bandwidth. Wirelessnorth has been playing with this particular rocketstick for several months now, but these are the fastest speeds we’ve ever seen.

One more thing, unlike Rogers cable, Bittorrent on HSPA+ is very fast and unthrottled.

>800 KBytes/sec (!) And we thought 250 was impressive just a few years ago. At this speed you could blow through your 6GByte monthly cap in about 2 hours and fifteen minutes.

To put all this in perspective, just three years ago, the fastest devices on the rogers network were still stuck on EDGE, good for little better than dial-up modem equivalent speeds.

PS: If anyone has comparable (or better) results for the Wind mobile or Bell/Telus HSPA+ network let us know if you can beat these scores.

While we were away, this year’s Canada3.0 conference took place, the grand summit of entertainment & digital executives, educators, and government leaders. Again this conference took place in the bustling digital cluster of Stratford Ontario also renown for it’s thespian population, verdant local agriculture and vague geographical proximity to Waterloo.

Fortunately for the rest of us, our friend David Eaves (who btw is on fire with prescient commentary these days) was on the scene. His thoughts here are absolutely essential reading:

But these moments aside, the more I reflect on the conference the more troubled I feel. I can’t claim to have attended every session but I did attend a number and my main conclusion is striking: Canada 3.0 was not a conference primarilu about Canada’s digital future. Canada 3.0 was a conference about Canada’s digital commercial future. Worse, this meant the conference failed on two levels. Firstly, it failed because people weren’t trying to imagine a digital future that would serve Canadians as creators, citizens and contributors to the internet and what this would mean to commerce, democracy and technology. Instead, my sense was that the digital future largely being contemplated was one where Canadians consumed services over the internet. This, frankly, is the least important and interesting part of the internet. Designing a digital strategy for companies is very different than designing one for Canadians.

…

Indeed, case in point was listening to managers of the Government of Canada’s multimedia fund share how, to get funding a creator would need to partner with a traditional broadcaster. To be clear, if you want to kill content, give it to a broadcaster, they’ll play it once or twice, then put it in a vault and one will ever see it again. Furthermore, a broadcaster has all the infrastructure, processes and overhead that makes them unworkable and unprofitable in the online era. Why saddle someone new with all this? Ultimately this is a program designed to create failures and worse, pollute the minds of emerging multimedia artists with all sorts of broadcast baggage. All in the belief that it will help bridge the transition. It won’t.

The ugly truth is that just like the big horse buggy makers didn’t survive the transition to the automobile, or that many of the creators of large complex mainframe computers didn’t survive the arrival of the personal computer, our traditional media environment is loaded with the walking dead. Letting them control the conversation, influence policy and shape the agenda is akin to asking horse drawn carriage makers write the rules for the automobile era. But this is exactly what we are doing. The copyright law, the pillar of this next economy, is being written not by the PMO, but by the losers of the last economy. Expect it to slow our development down dramatically.

Amen. The whole post is essential reading: Canada 3.0 & The Collapse of Complex Business Models

What Canada needs most of all is digital policy that actually drives disruption. Policy that maximizes the creative and innovative potential of any Canadian not just legacy Big Content. Let’s make Canada a nation of creators, not a nation of consumers. Let’s make digital policy and copyright policy that maximizes the distribution potential of the internets rather than blocking, throttling or criminalizing the tubes at the behest of walking-dead distribution models.

We here at WirelessNorth are super stoked to be partnering with Interactive Ontario to bring you a brand new event, the iP3 Forum in Toronto this June.

Toronto iP3 Forum — a one-day event that will explore the changing mobile landscape and the business opportunities associated with Apple’s Touch Platform (iPhone, iPad and iPod touch), as business models adapt to a market where people are always connected.

The forum will feature keynote presentations by industry leaders as well as concurrent technical and business sessions throughout the day. Technical Sessions will provide a deeper understanding of how to design and develop for Apple’s Touch Platform. Business Sessions will offer information and insights on how to leverage the Platform’s market potential. The day will conclude with a networking reception.

More info to come, but for now head to Interactive Ontario for the goods.

Link: More info, program, registration, speaker applications here