No iPhones for Canada for a Long Time

An arti­cle in the Van­cou­ver Sun talks about out what I’ve known since we moved here: Cell phone rates, par­tic­u­larly for data, are unbe­liev­ably expen­sive here, so an iPhone would cost $100 a month just for the data por­tion (not the talk por­tion), and it wouldn’t even be for unlim­ited data!

Apple is not going to do a deal with a car­rier with that high a price tag because almost no one would buy it and they would look elit­ist (not to men­tion, users would be unwill­ing to use the web browser for fear of run­ning up a higher data bill). Unless there is some real arm-twisting, the iPhone won’t be here for a cou­ple of years.

Just to see if I could find out any­thing more, I called up Rogers, who is my cell phone provider. Back in April, another blog­ger called them and they told him:

Rogers will be car­ry­ing the iPhone and will actu­ally func­tion as the exclu­sive Apple iPhone car­rier for the nation of Canada.

This time, the rep I got (after what felt like an inter­minable series of robots) said the party line was ‘no infor­ma­tion is avail­able about the iPhone’, and I told her that she might want to pass on that this arti­cle had appeared today, which would sour a lot of customers.

I’m not Jonesing for an iPhone, but I have to admit, the nearly daily crashes of my Treo 650 are get­ting old pretty quickly. Not to men­tion how dorky I look every time I head out of the house with my brick of Treo on the left side of my belt and my iPod on the right.