Posted on by David Drucker

No iPhones for Canada for a Long Time

No iPhones for Canada
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.

9 Replies to “No iPhones for Canada for a Long Time”

  3. Can we have a pho­to of “Dorky­Dave” head­ing out of the house all techno-loaded?!?!?

    I’m sure Pam would­n’t mind tak­ing the pic … 🙂

  5. Thanks for the tip on the image, Isabel­la — I’ve adjust­ed the URL. It was a mis­take to code it the way I did at first. (I used to host images with my old serv­er back in Boston. Am slow­ly migrat­ing to the new ones host­ing the blog itself.) As for the image, every once in a while I feel like I need some of those, just to keep the blog from look­ing dull. Which reminds me that I want to do anoth­er update to the banner.

    Thanks also for the peti­tion, Nan­cy. I’ve signed it.

    Bob — I’m not sure I’ve got a pho­to, but if you insist, I’ll have Pam take one the next time I head out for work some morn­ing. DorkyDave…(*sigh*)

  7. Yeah, data trans­fer over Cana­di­an cell net­works is ridicu­lous if you don’t have a cheap grand­fa­thered con­tract. Prob­a­bly explains why I’m hap­py with a very capa­ble ‘dumb’ phone that does Blue­tooth — for what I need to exchange with the phone(phone record­ings, the odd pho­to, con­tact lists), it’s a work­able kludge. 

    I’ve been pay­ing more atten­tion to the Open­Moko project late­ly. Part of this is because it pro­vides what looks to be a capa­ble phone (and the screen res­o­lu­tion — 283 ppi fer­gosshakes) and open plat­form that I can tweak to my needs. The oth­er rea­son is that the ‘con­sumer’ ver­sion of the Neo 1973 phone, com­plete with WiFi, should work on my exist­ing provider and be avail­able long before Apple decides to grace us Canucks with the iPhone.

  8. Hi Ian! The Open­Moko project does look cool, but don’t think that it will be as ele­gant nor have those cool motion sen­sors and touch screen (that sens­es more than one touch for cer­tain ges­tures) that the iPhone has. Not to men­tion the User Inter­face. Although Open Source is often a bar­gain and is great for servers and oth­er soft­ware, I nev­er liked any of the desk­tops or oth­er ‘user-fac­ing’ pieces of it, Even Adi­um, which is a nice open source chat client for the Mac, is a bit homely.

    BTW, nice to see your byline in the paper the oth­er day. Hope the con­tro­ver­sies (and read­er mail) is endear­ing you to them.

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