Posted on by David Drucker

Woo hoo! Airborne Swine Sighted!

This morn­ing I awoke to some incred­i­ble (and I mean this in the true sense of the word; I can scarce­ly believe it) news:

Rogers Issues State­ment on the Apple iPhone

TORONTO, April 29 /CNW/ — Ted Rogers, Pres­i­dent and Chief Exec­u­tive Offi­cer of Rogers Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc. today issued the fol­low­ing state­ment:
We’re thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Cana­da lat­er this year. We can’t tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.

About Rogers Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Inc.
Rogers Com­mu­ni­ca­tions is a diver­si­fied Cana­di­an com­mu­ni­ca­tions and media
com­pa­ny. We are engaged in wire­less voice and data com­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices
through Wire­less, Canada’s largest wire­less provider and the oper­a­tor of the
coun­try’s only Glob­al Sys­tem for Mobile Com­mu­ni­ca­tions (“GSM”) based net­work.
Through Cable and Tele­com we are one of Canada’s largest providers of cable
tele­vi­sion, cable tele­pho­ny and high-speed Inter­net access, and are also a
full-ser­vice, facil­i­ties-based telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions alter­na­tive to the
tra­di­tion­al tele­phone com­pa­nies. Through Media, we are engaged in radio and
tele­vi­sion broad­cast­ing, tele­vised shop­ping, mag­a­zines and trade pub­li­ca­tions,
and sports enter­tain­ment. We are pub­licly trad­ed on the Toron­to Stock Exchange
(TSX: RCI.A and RCI.B), and on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: RCI). For
fur­ther infor­ma­tion about the Rogers group of com­pa­nies, please vis­it
www.rogers.com.

Yes folks, Hell has offi­cial­ly frozen over.

But wait… let’s see: “lat­er this year” could mean any­thing between April 30th to Decem­ber 31st. So the longest I’ll have to wait will be 8 months. I guess that’s good news. I have to admit, this did look like an April Fool’s post­ing that is 28 days too late.

At the very least, we’ll see an end to the hand-wring­ing and cries of Why does Apple hate Cana­da? on so many of the web sites here.

7 Replies to “Woo hoo! Airborne Swine Sighted!”

  2. At first I thought your post was about some kind of bird watch­ing thing you did this week­end.

    Should be inter­est­ing to see how this plays out.…somehow I don’t think it’s going to be as good as what US res­i­dents have with respect to pric­ing and plans.…but we’ll see.

  3. John -
    Yeah, I know what you mean. I can’t imag­ine that data rates in Cana­da will sud­den­ly plum­met to US lev­els. That would require more than fly­ing pigs and hell freez­ing over. In fact, it would prob­a­bly sig­nal the end of times…

    Hi Bob -
    Actu­al­ly, I (like many, many oth­er Cana­di­ans) already have a jail­bro­ken and unlocked iPhone. Nev­er­the­less, it would be nice to have one that was offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned (and if I had trou­ble with it, I’d have some recourse).

  4. David, there was a rumour a cou­ple weeks back (that came from about as good of a source as you can hope for) that the Rogers iPhone would show up in Sep­tem­ber — I believe it even more in light of the news today.

    I’m guess­ing it’s also going to be the 3G mod­el?

  5. David, your Cana­di­an data plan whin­ing is behind the times. Even Rogers has final­ly anted up, though if you read some of the sil­li­er com­men­tary out there, you may assume this is not com­plete­ly, total­ly aimed at the impend­ing arrival of a cer­tain slab-faced wire­less hand­set.

    It is, and it means that the month-to-month charges for con­sumers with Rogers-sold iPhones will be pret­ty rea­son­able.

  6. I’ll be veeeeery curi­ous to see what the price for the iPhone is in Cana­da. They’ll be com­ing out just as I’m think­ing of upgrad­ing my cur­rent cell phone. Then again, I sup­pose the real ques­tion is — since I don’t text mes­sage peo­ple from phones and I hap­pi­ly lug my lap­top wher­ev­er I’m going these days any­way — do I even real­ly need one? I may sim­ply be too lazy to take advan­tage of all its fea­tures.

  7. Jonathon — I’ll be curi­ous as well, but I know what you mean about the ‘do I need one’ ques­tion. I’d have to say that this isn’t one of those things one needs, but it sure is a blast to use:

    The web brows­er is very good — it makes most web sites quite view­able, and ones that are designed for it look beau­ti­ful and are easy to read and use. Face­book, Twit­ter, Google and a cou­ple of oth­er iPhone-opti­mized web apps are now per­ma­nent icons on my home screen.

    Hav­ing a good dig­i­tal video play­er is great to catch up on a TV pro­gram so on a ride on the bus or sky­train, I have some­thing fun to help kill the time. The iPod music/podcast/audiobook stor­age (only 8 GB) is a lit­tle small for my taste, but I’m expect­ing future mod­els will address this as the cost of mem­o­ry goes down.

    The phone part of it is just plain spiffy and a plea­sure to use. I love see­ing the face of who­ev­er is call­ing (if I have a pho­to of them in my address book on the com­put­er). The UI for cre­at­ing con­fer­ence calls is eas­i­er than I’ve ever had before (eas­i­er than most desk­top phones).

    Being able to make my own ring­tones from any sound or music I have is fun, hav­ing my pho­tos avail­able all the time can come in handy (some­one the oth­er day asked what the train to Whistler was like and I was able to pull out a few pho­tos of the trip in a cou­ple of sec­onds).

    A bunch of oth­er soft­ware (and there’ll be far more after June when the soft­ware store goes live) holds the promise of a whole bunch of new pos­si­bil­i­ties. I’m look­ing for­ward to a good chat client, an RSS Read­er, and per­haps a Skype client. If that goes through, then when­ev­er I’m in a wifi net­work I can call any­where for either free (or cheap, if it’s skype­out) with a real phone, rather than a lap­top. Ya got­ta love that.

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