Apple’s iPhone is a pretty sweet piece of tech. Add in the support for Exchange (meaning it will soon push email at you like a Blackberry) the recently released Software Development Kit (which means that hundreds of cool new applications will run on it, without having to hack it) and you have a laptop-in-a-handset that users simply love to use the mobile Web.

But I won’t buy one when it eventually comes out in Canada.

Why? Because I live in Canada and the cost of our mobile data plans are absurd.

 Thomas Purves has a now out-of-date, but still revealing breakdown of mobile costs for 500 MB a month (not unreasonable for a moderate to heavy mobile surfer on an iPhone). Rogers will cost you $1,600 per month (which is incidently the only carrier that will be able to carry the iPhone).

You could surf the web at Canadian airports (who also have absurd net connection costs) every day, buy a new laptop every two months on a steady diet of Starbucks lattes and still have cash left over.

Telus and Bell are significanly less, but still many times higher than in other countries.

Compare this to the US where Sprint will run you $69 for the same data usage or hell even Terracom in Rwanda will only charge you $74 for the service.

So, until there is some sense brought to the marketplace and the Telecom Mafia that runs Canada bring down their costs by orders of magnitude, I won’t be buying an iPhone.  Not because I don’t want one, but I fear that actually using it for its intended purpose will break my bank.

For lovers of the mobile Web in Canada, or those eagerly anticipating the iPhone it is torch and pitchfork time.

[tags] Apple, Canada, Rogers, Telus, mobile,  [/tag]

This entry was posted on March 19, 2008 at 9:21 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Canada Issues Tech by dwalker No Comments Yet