iPhone Hysteria Hits Vancouver

Despite the protests here that Rogers is charg­ing too much for data (even after drop­ping the high-end price by a third, it’s still not unlim­ited), and despite the fact that cur­rent cus­tomers must wait a week before they can get one, the lines to buy an iPhone are pre­dictably around the block down­town in Toronto and Van­cou­ver.

While I’m not thrilled that I have to wait yet another week, as the com­ing of higher speed 3G net­work­ing, and GPS is a big deal for us, but best of all is actu­ally being able to get soft­ware that will not make the phone buggy or suck bits from the net down to the phone while I’m unaware, which was what hap­pened with one of the pirate pro­grams I had got­ten a while back. I’m par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in how the new soft­ware (most of it free) take advan­tage of the syn­ergy between the phone know­ing where it is and being con­nected to the Inter­net at decent speed. Imagine:

• You could take a tour of a museum or gar­den and had access to not one but sev­eral mul­ti­me­dia tour guides all at the same time? Enter­ing an art work’s num­ber might show related works, or offer other bio­graph­i­cal information.
• In a book­store you might get all of the com­pet­ing prices for the same book after you take a pic­ture of its bar code with your cam­era. Your cur­rent store could offer to match that price if they can keep the sale.
• A spe­cial ‘Lunch 4–1-1′ program/network that would not only tell you which friends were near and avail­able for an impromptu lunch, but also a restau­rant that all of you had said was either good or they wanted to try out.

I expect a lot of those sorts of appli­ca­tions to show up soon. The best part is that this is entirely an open-ended sit­u­a­tion; the lim­i­ta­tion is now no longer on the hard­ware or the infra­struc­ture, but the imag­i­na­tion of devel­op­ers and entre­pre­neurs. For Van­cou­ver and its decid­edly extro­verted blend of tech and love of leisure, cui­sine and enter­tain­ment, today is sort of a start­ing gun for a race to the next big social appli­ca­tion, and it’s not just Face­book and Twit­ter this time.

Fol­low up: Accord­ing to Twit­ter and news sto­ries around the web, it was not a very, ahem, smooth launch of the iPhone or 2.0 soft­ware. Servers got over­loaded, phones got bricked, iTunes ver­sion 7.7 took for­ever to down­load, and in gen­eral the whole process slowed to a crawl. I haven’t heard a story yet that wasn’t full of drama, wait­ing and headache. I’m sure there are oth­ers who can pro­vide more detail. Suf­fice to say I’m glad that I decided to wait a day or two before dip­ping my toes in the iWater.