When the 3G iPhone first came out (July 11, 2008), I laughed when my friend texted me saying she waited in line at 7am only to wait until 1pm when the Rogers network was back up to complete her phone upgrade. I couldn’t believe the stupid shit people would do for this piece of metal. The next day, Saturday, I was doing my ritualistic Facebook stalking and noticed a friend of mine uploaded a picture from his new iPhone. It’s not a new feature that I haven’t used before, but it was just a sense of convenience and panty-droppage that caught my attention. My Blackberry allows me to upload photos, but that would actually be useful if the camera worked. I always said I’d wait until the Bold comes out before I get a new phone, but the taste of glory was $200 and a hop-skip-and-a-jump away to my closest Rogers store.

Luckily my friend happened to have one left at his location, and totally didn’t put it aside from me (because all the reps know that you’re not supposed to do that:). After about 20 minutes, and a couple Belmonts later, I had this pimp ass iPod which allowed calls, mobile Internet access, GPS, and expandability of downloadable applications. Sorry, but I’m a sucker for a pretty face–and this phone has a beautiful one.

Not long after I got it, I swear I almost hit 3 cars on the way home while I tried to check my Facebook and figure out how to use the GPS. The fact that I would let this device endanger my own life to use it is proof enough that it’s pretty damn boss.

A few days later I actually figured out how to use the damn thing. GPS saved my ass while my gas light blinked on the highway. You have no idea how awesome realtime GPS tracking and landmark searching is until you hear your car sputtering while doing 120 on the 91. Conveniently enough, later that day I found out one of my favorite Italian restaurants closed down, but I didn’t realize until I drove 50 fucking km out of the way to find out. Luckily my iPhone pinpointed 3 other locations within a 10km radius, and the night was saved!

Don’t get me wrong… I still think the keyboard sucks monkey balls. That’s why I still have my Blackberry. You may think it’s silly, but holy convenience Batman! I do all my texting and pinning from a real qwerty keyboard, while I do all my online rasping with my iPhone. Right now my bill has increased by about $40 by adding a new device to my Rogers account. In 3 months after my Blackberry plan is available for change, I’ll strip the berry of its voice usage, and use it only for texting and pinning. Meanwhile I’ll beef up my iPhone’s voice package and all in all for two devices I’ll be paying approximately $90/month (which is what I would currently be paying for my single Blackberry device).

Mind you it wasn’t easy getting a plan like that. This post isn’t a guide on how to bitch at Rogers for their ridiculous prices, rather a tool for me to brag about how awesome my deal is. Remember, it’s not what you know, but who you know and what they can do for you.

note: All plans come with unlimited evening calling (9pm-7pm mon-fri, and weekends), visual voicemail…and that’s just about it).

Option 1: $60

150 weekday minutes
400mb data
75 text messages

With this deal, you have just enough weekday minutes to call in to the Rogers’ support department and bitch at the first human you speak to. There’s just enough data for you to read this website a few times, and text messages to last you a night out at the club.

Skip to Option 4: $115

800 weekday minutes
2gb data
300 text messages

The weekday minutes are more than sufficient, although a questionable limit on the data. 300 text messages still wouldn’t get a text-fiending teenager through the week.

Source: Rogers.com

To put it bluntly, these plans suck. If it weren’t for the massive public outcry of the 57,000 potential iPhone buyers, I doubt Rogers wouldn’t have released the new time-sensitive offer of 6gb/month for $30 addon. Of course this offer expires at the end of August. Awesome.

Now why is it that Canadians are paying, on average, 33% more for cellphone usage than anywhere else in the world? Answer: because we have two companies charging whatever the fuck they want, only having to compete with one another’s HIGH prices.

It’s great that Rogers has revised their data plan for the iPhone, but can you believe what it took for them to do it? About 50k people complaining. But even then, isn’t it ridiculous that they were able to come up with this extra offer so quickly? I’m just curious as to how much money Rogers is really making. The problem with having only two major cell phone service providers is that they can throw a number into the air without really having to worry about the competition, because the competition has no problem boosting their charges just as high. Sidenote: I’m going to bring my Blackberry back into this conversation because for $30 extra dollars, someone with an iPhone can get 6gb of data per month. For that same price, you get a measly 300mb (for those technology and mathematically inept: the iPhone plan gets you 20x more data). If you wanted 6gb for your Blackberry, it would be another $100. Fucking ridiculous. Fuck you Rogers.

Anyways, I should feel sorry for all the Canadians spending so much money on their cell phone bills, but it’s hard to feel sorry for myself. We’re getting royally fucked.

My Blackberry’s service bill for January 2008 was just short of $900. I don’t even browse the web, let alone use Google Maps or Facebook on it. Now how will that translate into the new plans for Rogers and Fido here in Canada? I’m currently on Rogers and they do not offer unlimited data (to Blackberry devices anyways). But they do offer 5mb for only $10/month. What the hell are you going to do with 5mb? I remember back in the day I could get on the net with my 14.4 modem and that was $20/month with unlimited downloads. That was 11 years ago. Mind you, if you double your data on your Blackberry to 10mb, it’ll be $20/month. Great. I’m pretty sure with my 14.4 modem I could download more than 10mb within a month. It may have taken about an hour to download 10mb, but at least I wasn’t charged for any data overages.

Rogers seriously need to unfuck their Blackberry consumers as soon as the unlimited data comes out for the iPhone. How pissed off would you be when you find out people have unlimited access to the web for $20/month while you’re sitting here typing on your Blackberry trying to view text-only sites.

Anyways, I’m not sure where I’m going with this. This “news” post should actually be filed under things that piss me off. Rogers-you guys piss me off.

Back on topic. 3G iPhones. Yippee. Come July 11th, tell me how it goes..

or was it?

being a canadian citizen is a pretty sweet deal if you want to go down to the states to pick up a bomb ass ed hardy sweater for 50% of what you’d get it up here, but it’s proportionally as painful as not having the iphone up here. well, it is up here, but who is going to pay $200 for rogers’ unlimited plan covering 100mb a month (which any average netaholic would blow through in about 3 hours).

everyone talks about how great it is, so here’s my $0.02 on why it sucks to be a canadian with an unlocked iphone:

1. warranty: as soon as your iphone is unlocked, say goodbye to your precious warranty. most will say who gives a fuck, but you will–as soon as your internal battery dies. even if you did have a valid warranty and lived in the states, there’s a 3-4 day turnover where you have to send your iphone in to get apple to replace the battery. i couldn’t even last a day without a phone that i had to go out and buy one the day after someone jacked it–dont know how anyone could live 3-4 days without one.
2. visual voicemail: think about this one for a sec. yeah, you get no visual voicemail…a feature you never had before. so whatever. but really, because the iphone uses visual voicemail, it does not alert you when you receive conventional voicemail. how the hell do you know if someone leaves you a message? question for the ages…
3. mass texting: i personally text about 10-15 people with a generic message every time i want to go out for an impromptu evening of drinking and/or debauchery. how am i supposed to do that with the iphone?! yeah– no mass sms’ing with this baby.
4. price: $600 for a ho-hum phone? i dont know about that. my old k800i was 500, but that baby had a 3.2mb camera. with this phone you get 8gb of internal memory? hm. ipod classics go for 400 with 160gb of space. this is basically an ipod shuffle with a phone attached to it. and for 5 times the price.
5. data: this has to be the biggest issue. no one is going to pay rogers the ridiculous $200/month for about an hour of downloading.

conclusion: i got a blackberry curve 8310. haha. it was a hell of a lot cheaper than any other fancy japanese phone i’d probably get ($400) and it does a whole bunch of other stupid shit that i never would even care for. one of the best features is the holster function. u can set it to have a different tone/vibe when u have it in a holster. better than turning it on “silent” mode or whatever.

it was a bitch syncing it with my mac, but 5 minutes of reading solved the problem and now i’m set. i’m happy with this phone, and i will be until the iphone is brought up to canada. and the price dropped by a couple hundie