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Apple iPad Available in New Zealand in July

Update: Apple have officially announced that the iPad will be on sale from 23rd July. Prices start from $799.

Apple iPadIt’s official: Apple says they plan to release the iPad in a bunch of new countries, including New Zealand, in July. Based on the Australian pricing, I’ll hazard a guess that the base models will hit at around $750 or $800 NZ dollars.

Full press release follows:
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AUCKLAND, New Zealand – 8 May 2010 – Apple® today announced that iPad™ will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK on Friday, 28 May. Customers can pre-order all iPad models from Apple’s online store in all nine countries beginning on Monday, 10 May. In the US, Apple has already sold over one million iPads and customers have downloaded over 12 million apps from the App Store, as well as over 1.5 million ebooks from the new iBookstore.

iPad allows users to connect with their apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before. Users can browse the web, read and send email, enjoy and share photos, watch HD videos, listen to music, play games, read ebooks and much more, all using iPad’s revolutionary Multi-Touch™ user interface. iPad is 13.4mm thin and weighs just 680 gms—thinner and lighter than any laptop or netbook—and delivers up to 10 hours of battery life.*

The App Store on iPad lets you wirelessly browse, buy and download new apps from the world’s largest app store. iPad includes 12 new innovative apps designed especially for iPad and will run almost all of the more than 200,000 apps on the App Store, including apps already purchased for your iPhone® or iPod touch®. Developers have created more than 5,000 exciting new apps designed for iPad that take advantage of its Multi-Touch interface, large screen and high-quality graphics.

Pricing & Availability

iPad is available in Australia for a recommended retail price of AUS$629 inc GST for 16GB, AUS$759 inc GST for 32GB, AUS$879 inc GST for 64GB for Wi-Fi models.  Wi-Fi + 3G models for a recommended retail price of AUS$799 inc GST for 16GB, AUS$928 inc GST for 32GB and AUS$1049 inc GST for 64GB. iPad will be sold through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com/au/store), Apple’s retail stores and select Apple Authorised Resellers. The iBooks™ app for iPad including Apple’s iBookstore will be available as a free download from the App Store on 28 May.

Apple plans to release iPad in Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore in July. Apple will announce availability, local pricing and pre-order plans for these nine additional countries at a later date.

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Ben’s New Zealand Twitter List

Twitter. You might have heard of it. Champion of Iranian democracy, connector of people, and font of all thing pointless and inane. Herein I present my list of New Zealand twitterers that you may or may not have an interest in following.

  • Not just any Morgan, @themorgan. Recently anointed as the most modest twitterer in New Zealand, Morgan is irreverent, immodest, and irascible (if rubbed the wrong way). His LOLs-per-tweet ratio is excellent.
  • I like to think of @sponno as the Dad of the Auckland internet community. Not that he’s (just?) an old man who wears walk shorts and socks with sandals, but more that he keeps us all in check, and makes us take a long, hard look at ourselves at Meetup and Web09.
  • Don’t follow @rgoodchild if you have a delicate sensibility. She’ll flirt with you just for practise, and tell you all about a love life (yours, hers, anybodies!) at the slightest prompting.
  • Sometime voice of @vodafonenz, @paulbrislen still manages to maintain his personality inside of the corporate PR black hole. I congratulate him for that.
  • A bit of an inspiration for me personally, @freitasm is the guy behind the biggest tech site in New Zealand, Geekzone. He’s connected like a freaking anchor chain, with ears in the most amazing places. It’s not unusual to get serious inside tech dirt popping up on the Geekzone forums before anywhere else.
  • When is an adman not an adman? When he’s @gredge, my bigger, and infinitely prettier, brother. At the time of writing, he’s in bloody Cannes (yes, sur le Med), judging Electronic Safaris or some shit.
  • @bernardchickey is not, despite his name, a guy who tweets about chickens. He’s New Zealand’s pre-eminent financial blogger, and not afraid to speak his mind.
  • Apparently you have to have @matthewbuchanan in one of these lists in order for it to be cool. Or something.
  • If New Zealand had iPhone royalty, you’d have to include @Avon (NZ’s friendliest iPhone dev), @majicDave, and @polarbearfarm.
  • Oh and me of couse!

If I’ve missed you out, it’s because I hate you. Judges decision is final, and no correspondence will be entered into. Unless you want to plead your case in the comments below.

[Inspired by Blues Park and Ideology]

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A Question Regarding Languages in New Zealand

La machine de questions a présenté une autre question:

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How many languages does one person speak on average in New Zealand?

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This is a really cool question. It’s good to be questioned on things outside of my regular geek canon. The quick answer is one.

Eighty percent of New Zealanders speak English and only English. This is largely because we don’t border on any other foreign language countries, and there is very little reason for New Zealanders to know another language to undertake trade or enjoy entertainment.

Maori and New Zealand Sign Language are also official languages of New Zealand, but the numbers fluent in those languages are low (4% for Maori and only 25,000-ish people for NZSL).

If you don’t require fluency in a language to be a criteria, I’d suggest that most (if not all) New Zealanders regularly speak at least some Maori. All kids are taught the basics in Maori, such as counting, colours, and Maori names for animals and plants. It’s not at all uncommon to drop Maori phrases into everyday conversation, and most Kiwis would know what you mean when you say “Kia ora bro, everything is ka pai, let’s go get some kai!”

Living in Auckland also makes things fairly interesting. The main language is still English, but due to the large immigrant population, something like 30% of the Auckland population are fluent in another language. I regularly have lunch in downtown Auckland, and it would be unusual for me not to have someone speaking a different language within earshot. I love it.

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S92a: A return to the bad old days?

Update: the blackout protest campaign, spurred by Juha’s post (among others), has caught on with Twitter top users @stephenfry and @leolaporte blacking out their avatars in support. Below is my take on S92a and why we are protesting.

SheriffBadge2 They say the Internet is the new frontier. Like the Wild West of old: loosely regulated, fast moving, and slightly anarchic. The Internet and the frontier west seem to match up anecdotally as well, with piles of optimism and some serious commercial opportunities.

One downside of life on the frontier ? if you believe what you see in the movies ? is that you were more likely than not to be shot dead at the mere accusation of skulduggery. If you couldn?t get the lawmakers to respond, why not deal with the issue yourself?

[quote]

“Rustling became so prevalent for a time that ranchers adopted and organized the [?] means of combating the menace. It became necessary for the ranchers to deal directly with the rustlers, because the law enforcement officals were not meeting the menace and depredations of the rustlers. In some instances the officals were coreced into refraining from adequately, dealing with the stealing and in a few instances the officals were involved with the rustlers.

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Luckily sanity prevails most of the time these days. The presumption of innocence goes a long way to eradicating the kangaroo court, and providing the accused with a forum to defend oneself. I doubt you?d find anyone willing to return to the bad old days.

Yet this is just what Section 92(a) of the New Zealand Copyright Act is proposing. Rights-holders are compaining that “law enforcement officals [are] not meeting the menace and depredations of the rustlers”. So the answer is to give the ranchers guns, and set them loose on the public. God forbid they happen to spot someone wandering along the fenceline and draw a bead on them. Even as late as this week, the ranchers recording industry are baulking at the idea of even allowing a moderating committee of ISPs to help implement the law. As it stands, the mere accusation of copyright infringement is enough to have someone disconnected from the internet.

You have to feel sorry for the poor ranchers back in the day. A horse or cow was a valuable beast (and still is), and the physical loss must have been crippling. The modern day bit-rancher on the other hand, is laughing all the way to the bank, and yet screaming WOLF at the top of his lungs throughout the journey.

Enough is enough. Join the Blackout.

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Vista Sidebar Gadget: NZ Rain Radar

This is perhaps a little too niche for some of my readers, but for all you New Zealanders who ride motorbikes (or 200cc Italian scooters!) to and from work, run Vista, and want a handy way to check if you need to wear your wet weather trousers, you may like my first Vista Sidebar Gadget.

It’s a rain radar image that regularly updates itself.  You can download it by clicking here, and it should install automatically if you’re running vista.

Sidebar gadgets are pretty interesting little things.  Basically cut down web pages, with some special API calls to enable saving and retrieving settings.

If you have problems or questions about the gadget, just fire me a comment here and I’ll get it in my email.

[tags]vista, gadget, sidebar, rain radar, new zealand[/tags]