Most of the team at Gameloft Toronto has been laid off.

The news was first reported by GamesIndustry.biz and corroborated by a variety of affected employees’ LinkedIn posts, including community team manager Tasha Huggins. Per the publication, 49 people have been let go, which follows roughly 40 layoffs in April. The site reports that only HR, IT, and management are unaffected by the cuts.

In a statement to GamesIndustry.biz, Gameloft attributed the layoffs to “ever-changing market conditions,” which it says led it to “substantially reduce our production activity in our Toronto studio.”

Founded in 2011, the Canadian developer has worked on notable licenced titles like Lego Legacy: Heroes Unboxed and Uno & Friends. Meanwhile, support for Gameloft Toronto’s Disney Magic Kingdoms, its long-running city-building game, has been transferred to Kharkiv, Ukraine. GamesIndustry.biz also reports that another game that Gameloft Toronto was working on has been cancelled.

This is the latest in a seemingly neverending string of layoffs in the gaming industry over the past year, including those at Xbox, PlayStation and Take-Two Interactive.

Image credit: Gameloft

Distributed also on: GamesIndustry.biz

MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.

The day has finally come and Canadians can now pre-order the Apple Vision Pro headset. 

This device is Apple’s bid at the future of computing, and while I’ve only tried it for a brief demo, I walked away extremely impressed.

You can pre-order the device on Apple’s Website and the base model starts at $4,999 in Canada. When you order, you’ll need to use the Face ID sensor on your iPhone to scan your face to get an accurate measurement for your light seal and headband sizes. You can also order lens inserts from Zeiss if you wear glasses. However, prescription lenses are $199 extra and reading glasses are $139.

If you want, you can also get your order at your local Apple Store, where an employee can help you set it up and teach you how to navigate visonOS. Of course, you can still get it shipped to your home as well.

You can also start booking Vision Pro demos, and you could get one as early as July 12. This will allow you to get a more personalized demo experience, and Apple Store employees can help you find the perfect fit. This is free to do and something I’d recommend since this device is worth trying before you buy it.

Other notes

In Canada the Vision Pro will launch with visionOS 1.2 and will get updated to visionOS 2 in the fall alongside Apple’s other yearly software updates.
It comes with a Solo Knit Band, a Dual Loop Band, a Light Seal with two Light Seal Cushions, an Apple Vision Pro Cover, Polishing Cloth, Battery, USB-C Charge Cable, and USB-C Power Adapter.
There’s an optional travel case for $279 and Apple Care+ costs $699.

MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.

Ahead of Amazon Prime Day in mid-July, Visa and Amazon partnered to help with big purchases on the shopping service. Canadian shoppers with eligible RBC and Scotiabank credit cards will now have the option to select ‘Installments enabled by Visa” as their payment method for qualifying purchases.

“We are excited to offer our installments solution on Amazon through two of Canada’s leading issuers, granting more consumers access to diversified payment methods and greater financial control with one of the world’s largest online merchants,” said Dan Sanford, head of product for North America at Visa in a press release. “Recognizing the growing demand for flexible payment options, we are committed to enhancing the end-to-end payment experience for Canadians to address their evolving needs.”

This is perfect for those like myself who plan on ‘doing it big’ on the Prime Day shopping event from July 16 to 17th.

Via: iPhone in Canada

MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.

The EU passed a law in 2023 which forces companies to switch to batteries that can easily be replaced by the phone’s owner.

To remedy this, a report from The Information claims that Apple is looking to replace the foil and adhesive it uses to secure its iPhone batteries with a new metal casing that could be dislodged with a bolt of electricity. This change is rumoured to start with the iPhone 16 before making its way to the full iPhone 17 series the following year.

To me, this doesn’t sound like an improvement since most people will likely need to rent or buy specialized hardware from Apple to apply this electricity to the electronically induced adhesive to make it stick and un-stick to your phone. To further that, we all know how hard it is to pry open a modern day iPhone. There are a few specialized screws and adhesives around the display to keep it water-tight. Truthfully, I think it’s the display removal, and not the actual battery swap, that holds back most users from wanting to self-swap their batteries.

This report has also come out after Apple has shared a white paper explaining its approach to building tough and replicable phones and balancing that with repairability. For instance, the company shared that when it added waterproofing to the iPhone 7 series repair rates dropped 44 percent. You can read more about the white paper here. 

Overall, I think this is a bit of an overreach by the EU since most people don’t have the skills or even the want to learn how to remove an iPhone screen to swap their battery. I think most people would rather pay around $100 not to have to worry about breaking their phone.

Header image credit: Shutterstock

Distributed also on: The Information 

MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.

Canadians can now get a decent discount on one of Nintendo’s most beloved games.

From June 28th to July 4th, last year’s acclaimed Super Mario RPG will be on sale for $54.99 (regularly $79.99) at GameStop Canada. Nintendo games often don’t drop in price much, if at all, so $25 off for a first-party Switch game that was released in November is pretty solid.

That deal just started, but a better deal at The Source is about to end on June 30th: Super Mario RPG for $49.99. Otherwise, the game is regular price at Best Buy, $54.99 on Amazon (after just being on sale for $69.99) and $69.99 at Walmart.

It’s worth noting that another Mario RPG, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, was just released on the Switch last month. What’s more, a brand-new Mario RPG called Mario & Luigi: Brothership will land on the Switch on November 7th.

Image credit: Nintendo

Update: 29/06/2024 at 7:24pm ET — Amazon had the game listed for $69.99 when this story was first written, but the price has now been dropped to $54.99. We’ve updated the story accordingly.

MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.

Yep, it happened to me. I know better, but I was in a vulnerable place (over my data cap) and the promise of a good deal got me. Here’s what happened.

During one of my last press trips to the U.S. I accidentally watched a 40GB 4K movie over Plex on my mobile hotspot, and by day two of the trip, I was over my 50GB data limit and stuck using throttled speeds. I was able to make it with an eSIM I bought from Airalo, but at the end of the day I wasn’t happy since I knew when I got back to Canada, I’d still be out of data for another two and a half weeks.

Then, on the last day of the trip, a few hours before my flight, I got a call from someone claiming to be with Rogers’ win-back department. The conversation was a little sketchy, but I switch plans via win-back deals often and it always feels a little sketchy, so I decided to press onwards.

It started out nice enough, with the person asking what my current plan was and then making a counteroffer of basically the same plan at a lower price. For me, this was 100GB of Canada-U.S data for $37.

Things started to go south when the person on the phone asked for my personal information but didn’t transfer me to a secure line or send a link to a secure site for me to input it. During this process I gave up my address, driver’s licence number and credit card info (including the three-digit code on the back, which I learned after is not needed for a credit check).

By the end of that exchange I was getting really paranoid so I asked for the person’s employee number and the deal number, and to my surprise, they gave me those numbers, but then they told me another person would call me in a few days to let me know how to get my SIM card. Since I’d already given them my address, this felt really strange.

So I get off the phone with them, use the RBC app to put a pause on my credit card and contact Rogers proper to see if the employee number or deal number I was given were in their system. The first person I talked to was unable to find them and told me that I was most likely caught in a scam. From there, he set up a call with someone higher up at Roger’s who should be able to verify beyond a doubt if it was a scam or not.

A few days later, they call me to say that, as far as they can tell, it was a scam call. However, for my troubles, he offers me the same deal as the scammer and then tells me that someone from the win-back department will reach out to me. A day later they do, but they don’t offer me the deal and instead question me about an attempted purchase of an iPhone 15 Pro Max. I assume the scammer is the person behind this but since I’d canceled my credit card at this point, the deal didn’t go through. At the end of this call I was offered a different phone deal that was more expensive than my current Freedom Plan so I decided that I was just going to leave it at that and move on.

Overall, this was a pretty brutal experience and while I knew better, it just goes to show that anyone can be the victim of a scam. Make sure you can verify that the person calling you actually works for the company they say you do and to never give out your credit card numbers over the phone.

MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.

MobileSyrup‘s weekly telecom news roundup is back. We missed a week since I was on vacation (though there wasn’t a ton of telecom news that week anyway). But we’re back with a few stories for you:

Pricing and deals

Rogers offering free Disney+ with ads to TV customers.

Reminder: Your Bell internet bill is going up on July 1st.

Infrastructure

Ookla speedtest shows how 5G boosts popular services in Canada.

Eastlink continues New Brunswick expansion with service, store in Tracadie.

Getting texts full of question marks? You aren’t alone.

Bell, Freedom impacted by roaming outage.

You can find the last telecom roundup here.

MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.