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.