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.

Share

By David Drucker | Filed in Canada, Tech, Vancouver | July 13, 2007 2:15 pm

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

  1. Avatarisabella mori
    Posted: Jul 13th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
    1

    LOVE that image!

    and no iPhones here for a while?

    croc­o­dile tears run­ning down my cheek.
  2. Avatarnancy
    Posted: Jul 13th, 2007 at 3:41 pm
    2

    There’s an online peti­tion cir­cu­lat­ing: http://www.petitiononline.com/iPhone99/petition.html
    implor­ing Rogers to align data rates for their Cdn cus­tomers, with rates for AT&T’s (major shareholder’s) cus­tomers in the states.
    Wouldn’t it be won­der­ful if there was a cel phone ser­vice we could all actu­ally like?
  3. AvatarWest End Bound
    Posted: Jul 13th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
    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 … :)

  4. Avatarisabella mori
    Posted: Jul 13th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
    4

    oh, and why do your images not show up when i look at the indi­vid­ual articles?
  5. Avatarddrucker
    Posted: Jul 13th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
    5
    Author Comment

    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*)
  6. AvatarWest End Bound
    Posted: Jul 13th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
    6

    Hey, now you know the only rea­son I dubbed you that was because of your description.

    You’ll always be “Dar­ing­Dave” to me .…
  7. AvatarIan King
    Posted: Jul 14th, 2007 at 2:11 am
    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. Avatarddrucker
    Posted: Jul 14th, 2007 at 7:31 am
    8
    Author Comment

    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.
  9. pingback pingback:
    Posted: Sep 15th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
    9
    Loud Murmurs » The Puppet Speaks for Me

    […] know I’ve blogged in the past about this, but here’s more Cana­dian iPhone […]
SexyComments by BorkWeb