Beginning this Friday, customers can purchase all models of iPad through Apple’s retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers.

Pricing & Availability

All iPad models will be available in Austria, Belgium, Hong Kong, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand and Singapore this Friday, July 23.

Pricing in New Zealand would be starting from $799 incl GST for the WiFi only model and $999 incl GST for the WiFi+3G model

“Telecom’s strong preference is to align the interests of its equity and debt holders with those of the Government and New Zealanders,” said Paul Reynolds, CEO, Telecom. “The Government’s UFB initiative will fundamentally reshape the structure of the entire telecommunications industry in New Zealand and Telecom is therefore undertaking a thorough assessment of the merits of structural separation.

“In making a thorough assessment of structural separation we need to have a detailed understanding of the regulatory environment, and this warrants detailed discussion and analysis with Government before any decisions regarding its viability can be made,” he said.

“We are conscious that we should all be focused on how best to create New Zealand’s fibre future.

“However Telecom is required by legislation to deliver significant system and technology projects envisaged for a pre-fibre world. A large proportion of these projects must be deployed this year, so it seems sensible at this time to reassess these projects to avoid significant congestion and waste.

“As a result we have asked the Minister to consider a variation on three components of Telecom’s Undertakings that we believe will no longer be relevant in a fibre future.

“These three amendments will not impact on the service levels experienced by our end user and industry customers, and will not detract from the EOI level playing field. Rather, they reflect how fast the policy and technology environment is evolving in telecommunications.

“In these three areas Telecom, industry participants and New Zealand consumers face significant costs and risks of disruption that were not foreseeable at the time the commitments were made. They also lock Telecom, the industry and the Government into some choices which should be considered as part of the UFB initiative and the potential structural separation of Telecom,” he said.

The proposed changes are to:

- Suspend the forced bulk migration of existing broadband customers onto a new copper-based broadband service. We will, however, continue to supply this new broadband service to all new customers;

- Remove the requirement for Telecom to migrate 17,000 customers onto a new VoIP over copper service by the end of this year;

- Remove the requirement for Telecom to build a new set of wholesale systems that are not consistent with the industry structure implied by UFB.

Telecom’s fibre-to-the-node programme is not impacted by the variation requests.

I’m contemplating bringing in a Roku from the U.S, can anyone tell me if the Roku set top box will work in NZ?

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Well, school holidays are technically over. The kids go back to school on Monday so things should settle down again with the recording schedule.

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The participants at the PublicACTA Conference of 10 April 2010 respectfully submit this, the Wellington Declaration, to the parties negotiating the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), for their consideration during the Wellington round of negotiations.

Source: PublicACTA.org.nz

Further information about ACTA and PublicACTA can be found at both http://acta.net.nz and http://publicacta.org.nz

The final document can also be found on the PublicACTA website. There, you can also find a link to a petition that will be included with the document. According to the PublicACTA website, signatures will only be included, if signed by Tuesday.

Call me cynical, but who cares if a 2 1/2 year old can push pretty icons on the iPad. I’m sure my cat can do the same thing. I am so over hearing about the iPad. Yes, it may have it’s use for a minority of people. Personally I can’t justify spending over NZD$1000 on something I can’t pull apart and upgrade the internals on. Surely I am not alone here.

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The National Library has commissioned the Internet Archive (an American-based not-for-profit) to perform the harvest on our behalf.

We will attempt to acquire:

Websites that fall under the .nz country code
Websites that fall under .com. .net and .org that can be programmatically determined to be hosted on machines that are physically located in New Zealand
Selected websites based overseas that are covered by the provisions of the National Library of New Zealand Act (2003).
We estimate we will capture 130-140 million URLs, resulting in 7-8 terabytes of uncompressed data.

Source: National Library

The harvest of New Zealand based websites will take place over a 14 day period, between 12 and 25 May 2010. Unlike the last harvest the Library did in 2008 where they ignored the robots.txt file, this time after a consultation process the National Library has decided that the harvester will strictly honour robots.txt files. However, “the harvester will always capture the homepage of a website.”

The web harvest itself is reportedly going to be undertaken by Internet Archive, a US-based not-for-profit organization and will have the user agent string NLNZHarvester2010.

Updates of the 2010 Web Harvest can be found on the LibraryTechNZ Blog

Q: How does the warranty work on these since they were purchased in the states? Can you buy apple care for them?

A: Hi, I was told it has a 12 month international warranty and I have the receipt which goes with the iPad dated 3 April 10 so it has a warranty until 3 April 11. Not sure about apple care for these in NZ.

While I’m personally not looking at purchasing an iPad, the question got me thinking. Will these devices being sold on TradeMe have any form of warranty with them in New Zealand. Technically I would have thought buying from a private seller on TradeMe would class this as being a “second hand” item. Are the warranties on the iPads transferable or will they even be honoured in New Zealand considering they were initially bought in the United States?

Maybe someone can clarify this, but in the meantime. I suggest people looking to purchase a privately imported iPad be cautious before parting with their hard earned money. If anything goes wrong with the device in the warranty period, you may just find yourself having to deal with a U.S based company at your expense.

The iPad wifi version is being brought into New Zealand and listed on Trade Me by people who have purchased the iPad in the United States and bringing them back to NZ.

Currently Apple New Zealand has not released an official launch date of when the device will be available in New Zealand.

Pricing for an iPad on Trade Me is currently ranging between $799.00 and $1234.00 with most auctions having numerous bids already.

We’ve had a good easter weekend, My parents came down from Auckland on their VL1500 Suzuki Boulevard. So it was great to see them again. I got to go for a cruise around a car park on the bike (Only allowed on the Road with upto 250cc at the moment) it was great to have a quick ride around on the 1500cc though.

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