Cellphones.ca

Stuart Foxman offers “4 Ways to Get a Better Phone Deal” in the February edition of Reader’s Digest. In addition to Stuart’s tips, we’ve offered up some advice on how you can save on your cell phone. Check it out on newsstands today.

Today we’re very excited to let you know that we’ve rolled out a major revision of Cell Phones Etc.. This is technically the 3rd major release in our history, but it represents the first since bringing together a small, extremely dedicated team to work on the site full-time.

Together, we’ve rebuilt things from the ground up, top-to-bottom, front-to-back….and we think you’ll agree it’s:

Sexier: thanks to a lovingly overhauled design and user interface

Faster: thanks to cleaner, more beautiful code and a shiny new set of servers

Richer: thanks to our largest, most detailed database of phones and plans ever

Better: thanks to things like the handy new filters you’ll find in the comparison tools (yes! you can finally search phones by operating system)

Everyone here is working extremely hard to create the Web’s most helpful mobile phone guide. We hope you’ll agree this is a step in the right direction. As always, we’d love your feedback.

That’s it for now, but we’ll be pushing out features on a regular basis and tweaking often so stay tuned for some more announcements soon!

Thanks,
Branden

Sometimes the truth is ugly. And..in terms of ugliness, our aging specs database was, behind the scenes, as ugly as O’Donnell vs. O’Reilly. No longer. Today we bring good news.

We’ve scrubbed our data to its bones, got strict with structure and toiled away to denormalize things. What does that all mean? Basically, it means faster, more accurate specifications.

The most exciting part, beyond all the technical rattle, is that we’ve added 41 brand new bits of information about each phone. You’ll now find details on GPS types, Bluetooth protocols, Wi-Fi support and much more.

Delivering you the most comprehensive and accurate phone specs out there is pretty darn exciting for us geeks. Today, we believe we got close but…we’re not done yet.

Today we’re announcing more. More expert reviews in our collection (about 1,000 new summaries) and more buying options for Canadians, including thousands of choices from eBay. And…umm…yes….more to come.

Lots of you have been asking us to include more cell phone carriers in our cell plan comparison tool. Today we began to respond.

You can now compare the rates of SpeakOut, PC Mobile and Petro Canada alongside the other major carriers. Regional carriers such as SaskTel Mobility and US carriers are also on our to-do list.

More choice is a good thing. We hear you.

Alex rolled another small function live this morning. It’s a pretty simple yet useful feature we should have had long ago - the ability to adjust the number of phones or plans returned on one page. By default we’re serving up 20 results per page. If your bandwidth or patience for scrolling is running thin, you can slim it down to 10. If you’re sporting a quick connection and you’re handy with the scroll wheel you can crank it up to 30. Hopefully there is something in there to suit everyone.

We’ve been working hard to get more and more reviews for each and every phone. Reviews from users just like you as well as reviews from the pros - all pulled together into one spot. Response to this has been good but many of you have let us know that all this selection has made it hard to find the reviews that you really needed.

Today we hope that we’ve moved one step closer to addressing some of those concerns. We’ve just rolled live the ability to sort reviews by freshness, rating and helpfulness (as voted on by visitors).

Check out the iPhone 3G ratings as an example.

In the future we hope to turn out some other neat ways to find the reviews that are relevant to your needs. Stay tuned.

Consumer commando Ellen Roseman of the Toronto Star looks at low-cost cell plans in today’s paper. In her column, Ellen discusses new competition coming to Canada thanks to last year’s wireless auction.

She mentions Public Mobile, set to launch this fall with $40 plans, Globalive’s similar offering and other potential entrants including DAVE, Novus, Videotron, Shaw and EastLink. Ellen’s advice? “Better deals await you, so don’t lock in a long-term rate now.”

You can catch the full article here including a resource supplement that includes 10 money saving tips from us here at Cell Phones Etc..

Technology reporter Paul Brent of CTV News in Ottawa is doing a 3 part series on cell phones. As part of the series, Paul dropped some questions our way about the future of wireless in Canada and how you can save money.

You can catch our response here and watch this great video feature online at the CTV website.

In a recent article titled “Cellphone extras add up quickly”, Tim Lai of the Vancouver Sun investigated what consumers should be aware of when shopping for a new cell phone plan or looking to improve their existing service.

It’s a quick read with some good tips including a couple offered up by us. Thanks to Tim and the Sun for getting in touch and featuring CellPhones.ca in the article.

“Most of us have learned what to avoid by trial and error. You might have three or four cellphones in your family. So, it’s likely you have tried a number of different providers. And, each service provider offers a multitude of plans. If you check out the excellent website cellphones.ca you’ll find 207 plans available in the Hamilton/Burlington area.”

The Hamilton Spectator

TechVibes recently hooked up with comScore to “get some real data” behind their Canadian startup index. Using comScore data, Cell Phones etc. moves into 10th place in Canada just behind TravelPod.com.

What today brings is some design changes. We’ve revamped our main cell phone news page, moving away from your typical blog layout in favor of 3-column format more reminiscent of a newspaper site.

You’ll also find recent discussions in the sidebar, related stories on individual post pages and a better archive that allows you to browse stories by category and date.

Before:

After:

Why the change? Well..first off we hope this will make it easier to browse through stories and pick the ones of interest to you - less scrolling.

The other reason is that as of today we’re renewing our editorial focus. The aim is less regurgitation and more in-depth articles, commentary and reviews.

Hope you like it!

Last week we upgraded some hardware in an attempt to give our site a bit of a boost. Seems it worked. According to our monitoring service, the awfully handy Pingdom, we’ve scored a 30-40% improvement in response times.

Same host - newer, better hardware.

If you’ve been trucking along on the same server for a while now, it may be time to give your host a ring and ask to be moved onto a something a little shinier.

A couple weeks ago we made the list of top Alberta Startups.

Well, we’ve also made the TechVibes list of top Canadian startups.

For the month of July we’re sitting in position #23. That places us among some great company in the top 25 but we can do better right? Hmm…I think so. Stay tuned :-)

Hopefully none of you noticed, but we experienced a minute or two of scheduled downtime over the past 48 hours as we moved our site over onto some newer, more robust servers. As a small company with a limited budget, we try and improve site response times as much as we can with smart coding practices. Nevertheless, the time had come to throw some new hardware at the site and we’re happy to say that things are much spunkier as a result. Thanks to MediaTemple, purveyors of superb webhosting, for their assistance in this area.

In addition, Alex performed a number of software upgrades. He’s done a great job as our technical architect and we’re feeling confident about what we’ve got under the hood.

Here’s a few of the pieces in our kit:

- Low Latency DNS (DNSMadeEasy)
- PHP 5.2
- mySQL
- Symfony development framework
- AJAX jQuery library
- YUI library
- lighttpd web server
- eAccelerator bytecode cache
- various firewall and code security plugins

Canadian technology website TechVibes (recommended reading) has included us in their Start-Up Index for the province of Alberta. The index ranks Alberta tech start-ups based on an average of Alexa and Compete traffic ratings.

For June 2008 Cell Phones etc. is sitting at #4. We’re pretty darn happy about that. Thanks as always to our loyal visitors!

It’s official. We’ve hooked up with NetShelter. In doing so, they’ve become our exclusive ad sales partner, responsible for all of the advertsing slots on the site.

NetShelter is an experienced bunch who focus 100% on technology websites and we’re very excited to be joining exclusive company like HowardForums and PhoneScoop in their “Mobile Group”.

What it means
It means we can concentrate on the things that matter…improving the site and continuing to turn out new features.

What it doesn’t mean
It doesn’t mean annoying “punch the monkey” ads and pop-ups. We promise! Our committment remains to deliver unbiased information, keep things clutter-free and only serve ads that you might find interesting.

If you have any feedback about the ads you see please contact us. If you’d like to inquire about advertising/sponsorship opportunities please get in touch with our account manager:

Peyman Nilforoush
Head of Agency Relations
NetShelter, Inc.
Email: peyman@netshelter.net
Phone: (905) 764-7139 Ext. 222
Fax: (905) 764-9470