The only reason why I would step foot into a Black’s Photo retail store was if I wanted a photo frame or perhaps a nice photo album that I could use as a gift. I’m not the kind of person to print out my pictures, but there are lots of people who still do. The quality you get from “real” photo finishing is still better than most print-at-home solutions.

I’m not entirely sure why Telus would target Black’s for an acquisition, but it does help to provide some more retail presence and it could pave the way for some interesting convergence. For instance, they could load up Telus phones with an app that would send camera phone photos directly to Black’s for printing right from the handset. That’d be nice for people who want prints of those pictures.

So, the next time you walk into Black’s, you can pick up a new Nikon DSLR, a tripod, a photo frame, and a BlackBerry? The total price for buying all 113 Canadian locations, along with everything else to do with Black’s, was quoted at $28 million.

Source: MobileSyrup

Rumors of a Bell and Telus merger have been on again and off again for a number of years. Telus has been quite interested in entering merger discussions with Bell, but these talks haven’t really come to pass. Given this new partnership, however, they could merge to better compete in this changing wireless climate.

More specifically, new wireless carriers will be enterting the arena very soon and we could be looking at a “Bellus” to best compete against these new entrants. Together, Bell and Telus control about 60% of the Canadian wireless market.

RBC Dominion Securities analyst Jonathan Allen feels that a “BCE-Telus merger is increasingly likely in the coming year or two as both companies look to cut costs and sustain margins. There is only so much cost cutting that can be achieved individually.”

Should they indeed merge, the new entity would be saving over $1.2 billion annually. That’s nothing to sneeze at.

Soure: MobileSyrup

We had already known that Telus would be getting the BlackBerry Tour, since the CDMA-fueled smartphone is already scheduled to make appearances with Verizon and Sprint to the south. The current word is pointing toward a July 15th release of the BlackBerry Tour 9630, most likely at a $200-ish with contract price.

The two other phones in the flyer, however, have not yet been officially revealed in any form by Telus. First, we have the HTC Snap, a bar-style QWERTY smartphone that will likely be running on Windows Mobile 6.1. It also has that “Inner Circle” feature to manage your closest contacts. We’re looking at a $450 price point sans contract.

At the bottom of the page is the HTC Touch Pro2, the phone that obviously follows up on the first HTC Touch Pro. It’ll once again have the slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a big touchscreen. A $550 without contract price is likely.

Source: MobileSyrup