Freyburg

This one is about the Canadian reaction to the Rogers data rates for the iPhone. And next month, I’ll hopefully have an honest-to-goodness-in-the-paper-magazine article in Mac | Life.

Yes, pigs are currently cruising through a very, very cold Hades, because Apple is finally releasing the iPhone in Canada, and not only that, it’s the new, improved, 3G iPhone. Due July 11th at Apple Stores, Rogers and Fido outlets, and presumably online. Of course, the potential fly in the ointment of all this mobile love is the big question of what precisely Rogers will charge for an iPhone-centric data plan. I’d like to think the larger opportunity of a game-changing product like the iPhone would jar Rogers to their senses and force them into an unlimited plan for $50 or less…but I’m not holding my breath.

Apple also rolled out Mobile Me, a revamp of the moribund .Mac service which prove to be quite useful (because .Mac certainly wasn’t), and the much awaited App Store, which promises to bring much the same creativity and device-extending goodness as the….uh, jailbreak community has for the last year.

Will I get a new 3G iPhone? it all depends on what Rogers does in terms of a data plan. There’s no point in having always-on connectivity if within a month I’m broke. But if they come to their senses and offer a reasonable rate, I’m most likely in.

While the traditional model of aid for developing countries is to dump a big pile of money into the lap of sometimes questionable governments, it turns out that the key to ending poverty might be to decentralize, lend smaller amounts of money to a larger group of people, and distribute cell phones amongst the poor. That’s subject of Wired founder Kevin Kelly’s blog post, which points to research indicating that democracy is more likely to sprout up when money, resources and communication tools are given out on a many-to-many model rather than a hierarchical, authoritarian approach. I recently had a chance to interview someone at Kiva.org, a microfinancing site, and he reiterated that not only do micro-loans do tangible good but the poorest beneficiaries of the loans are the most likely to pay back their debts.

At any rate, its interesting to see the Internet peer-to-peer model spreading to the developing world at the micro level. At the macro level, as noted in Fareed Zakaria’s “The Post-American World,” developing nations like India and China re already reaping the benefits of outsourcing, connectivity and a global marketplace.

Friday night… an edgy East Vancouver club/gallery/skatepark… after the DJ finishes a two-hour set, the crowd of hipsters eagerly awaits Vancouver’s own faux-Brit powerpop punk bad The Tranzmitors’ live show… and pockets of Internet geeks nervously eye the crowd while checking out… the Microsoft Zune?

If it sounds like a strange scene for a Microsoft product launch, it was indeed, but then, the Zune is an odd product, a hardware device from a (mainly) software company, with hobbled wifi (for limited file sharing only!) and DRM incompatibility with Microsoft’s own PlaysForSure standard for music players.

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It’s about damned time. Though Rogers hasn’t said much else, so we don’t know if this is the rumoured 3G model, or whether they’ll reduce their ridiculous data rates to something civilized. Since I already have an iPhone, I’m waiting to see just how much better the new phone will be…and then we’ll see.

I wrote an article for Mac|Life about the lengths we have to go to north of the border to get and use iPhones. I think Mac|Life deserves extra points for using a flappy headed South Park Canadian as the symbol of our displeasure.

Canada is well known as one of the most expensive places on the planet to use your cellphone, particularly if you want to get on the internet or perform other data-ntensive tasks. But there’s finally a hint of progress in the air, with Telus and Bell changing their data rate plans in anticipation of competition with the iPhone, which can only be carried on Rogers thanks to its use of the GSM band.

There’s also a low-priced iPhone competitor on the way in the form of the HTC Touch, which probably isn’t quite as good as Apple’s device, but at $99 is considerably cheaper.

Canada is behind the rest of the world when it comes to both the level of cell phone technology we get to play with (no iPhone? Bah!) and our outrageously expensive data plans. So it’s nice to see that the CBC, amongst other media, is tackling the issue head-on. There’s been a bit of a groundswell of coverage of the lack of competition between different wireless carriers in Canada, and one can only hope this signals changes on the horizon.