With its hefty price tag and software quickly approaching its sell-by date, the upcoming Bold 9900 from RIM isn’t bold, it’s brash.

RIM announced the Bold 9900’s pending release Wednesday morning, and it’s one of five new smartphones RIM will debut before year’s end. On paper, the Bold 9900 looks like a strong smartphone contender. It runs the new BlackBerry 7 operating system, RIM’s latest software update to the mobile platform.

It’s also a hybrid device, so those who don’t want to lose a QWERTY keyboard to a new touchscreen can have both. And it runs on T-Mobile’s 4G network, which has decent ...

Hussain Sujel (right) laughs with a customer at his corner store in Montreal, Quebec. Photo: Myriam Rafla and Moe Ments.

The first round of submissions for our Assignment Wired project are in, and we’re impressed by the efforts of those who submitted. Every participant put in the time to photograph their corner store and write an accompanying story with quotes and research — no small feat.

We summarize a select number of submissions below, along with advice for each. We also choose three submissions for editing and image processing so that readers can get an idea for our process and what effect...