Hey iPhone, please disrupt Canada!
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There has been no news from Apple Canada related to the Apple iPhone. Since the phone is GSM only there’s just one network where it can work: the Rogers network. This leaves Fido the only other possible carrier. Neither carrier has confirmed that they will be carrying this shiny touchscreen hybrid. I’m left hopeful by Rogers subscribers who’ve emailed their CSRs and received back confirmation that Rogers is in talks with Apple. The Globe couldn’t dig out an official comment.
I’m not all that eager for an iPhone as a phone. I am eager for a push towards better mobile internet in accessibility, usability and price. Already the iPhone has shown itself to afford better accessibility. From the iPhone demo I picked out that it handles CSS fairly well and renders complex pages slowly compared to my laptop browser, but quickly compared to my old Toshiba e740 with either Pocket IE or Thunderhawk. I look forward to being able to ignore the “search only the mobile web” feature of Google. Forget wap 2.0, this phone can join web 2.0 as we know it and even its interface fits in.
There won’t be any Flash. There probably won’t be any iPhlash. Digg will lose a tiny bit of shininess and you can’t youtube. Kiss any flash centric page goodbye and welcome everything else. There are a great many pages that are optimized for mobiles but many more that aren’t. I’m glad that Google Reader and Mapquest are easily available on my phone. It’s a welcome break from the usual frustrations; I’ve never had a browsing session where every page I’ve wanted to visit has worked. I’ll be happy when I can hit Google News and click on highly ranked links for all of the day’s major stories without seeing a horrifically broken webpage.
To make the most of this phone you’ll need to pull down a whole lot of data. I’ve frequently complained that cellular data is far too expensive and the iPhone will use a lot of it. That may be why Cingular is requiring all iPhone purchasers to pick up a data plan. I’m hoping that it will be an unlimited plan similar to the hiptop plan and that Rogers will follow suit. My hiptop is going to die within a year and I don’t ever want to give up cheap unlimited mobile internet.
Wifi isn’t enough for me anymore. I have tasted ubitquitous internet access and I’m addicted. The iPhone could jolt providers into reasonable data rates, web site owners into rich and dynamic mobile pages, and give everywhere access to the mainstream. Apple, thank you for promising to disrupt. Even though I likely won’t buy it I await the iPhone landing.
2 Comments to “Hey iPhone, please disrupt Canada!”
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Since Fido was bought by Rogers, there has been only one GSM carrier in Canada. Given that Rogers likes to emphasize having the latest and greatest phones, I can’t imagine that they wouldn’t support the iPhone as soon as practical. It would take significant work because of the iPhone’s voicemail integration and perhaps other special features new to the iPhone.
Oh, you’ve got the $20 Fido hiptop data plan? You won’t get such a deal again, so before your hiptop dies you might want to do what a friend of mine did: buy a replacement hiptop on eBay. (He bought one where the camera didn’t work, something he didn’t care about, so he got a good price.)
I doubt that disruption is part of Apple’s (and the carriers’) plans. The iPhone is a premium product, not something that will be priced to undercut the competition. Don’t expect to get any deals on data, nor on the phone itself. Steve Jobs wants people to lust after this phone as much as they lust after iPods, and to be willing to make sacrifices elsewhere in their lives as needed to meet his prices.
I too love ubiquitous Internet access (via my Treo 650). My wife and I frequently marvel at this bit of magic. I actually get away with a minimal ($25) data plan, but that’s because I use Opera Mini as my browser. It compresses pages before they get transmitted over the air. Not only does this make the speed acceptable (using my Treo’s built-in browser is like being on dialup), but it vastly reduces the amount of data transmitted, to the extent that I don’t hit the bandwidth limit on my cheap plan. Unless Apple allows Opera Mini to run on the iPhone, using an iPhone might require a higher-end (i.e. expensive) data plan.
I think I missed the window for buying a hiptop. I’d watched for a while and they seem to close for more than $200 for a used phone these days. I’m still deciding whether I want to continue along with it since it’s so very limited.
As for the iPhone disruptions I still think we’re going to see richer web applications aimed at the mobile user. We’re going to see phone manufacturers implementing browsers that don’t tear so much out of webpages and reformat. Rogers will also have to change their plans simply because the only data plan for new consumer level customers is 2mb for $5. Even with 50% compression (acheived through lossy recompression of images and compression of text through zlib) that’s only eight loads of the new york times front page demoed in the keynote. Add push email to the mix and doing what was advertised in the keynote will be beyond premium cost, it’ll be prohibitive.
I am eagerly anticipating news related to the data plans that will be packaged with Cinglar’s iPhone. The more I think about it the less likely I think Rogers will have an unlimited EDGE plan. At the worst case I see them bringing over the business data plans to the consumer side. Best case, they bundle a couple dozen megs of cellular data with access to their wifi hotspots. I’d be ecstatic and switch in a heartbeat if they offer unlimited data for near the converted going rate in the US.
Also, I sent Rogers customer service request to see what they’d suggest for me as a consumer that goes through 30mb of data per month. I wonder if they’ll let me use a business data plan on a consumer voice plan.