There are really two very interesting observations from this statement...
I did a driving trip down to the Niagara region on Saturday, but in my case I used my Nokia E90, which of course
does get cellular reception, and also has a GPS built-in. It happily gave me audible turn-by-turn driving directions throughout the entire trip, navigating me directly to where I wanted to go. In addition, when I wanted to stop for coffee and find a nearby Tim Horton's while en-route, I was able to not only search for one (using "find near my position"), but was able to get talked right in to the location by hitting one or two additional buttons with the search result, even in the midst of busy QEW traffic.
So my first point is that from a
features perspective, there's very little the iPhone does that's revolutionary. I've been saying this for a while, but it's never been about
what the iPhone does, but rather
how it does it. The interface is brilliant, and it's definitely the slickest unit I've ever used, but I'm continuously bumping up against what it
can't do (as a long-time smartphone/PDA user), and some of those omissions are just downright strange at this point.
The second point, however, is that where the iPhone
has revolutionized things is in its ability to expose the "common man" to the world of more sophisticated phone features. Again, I can think of any number of phones from five years ago that can do most of what the iPhone can do, but the reality is that there are many people out there (like
imachungry) who may never have otherwise been exposed to this.
In short, when I see people getting excited about the fact that the iPhone can give them driving directions while in the car, or let them surf the web when running around downtown Toronto, I tend to yawn and sort of ask myself how that's new in any meaningful way...
On the other hand, the very fact that there are people out there who are discovering the ability to do these sorts of things for the first time
because of the iPhone is definitely interesting, and probably says a lot about the iPhone's design and target market.
Well, from what I heard (taken with the appropriate grain of salt), Rogers
did want to be on the initial-release bandwagon so they could benefit from the hype being generated in the U.S. Apple stonewalled Rogers in this case, since they wanted to focus on the U.S. release and had not interest in dealing with Canada until later. Several announcements and press releases from Rogers seem to support this, and it wouldn't surprise me if Rogers was being petulant around April when they backpedalled and suddenly announced that there was no information on the iPhone coming to Canada.
The reality is that even just talking to the folks at the local Apple Stores in Toronto, the number of calls they received inquiring about the iPhone seemed an indication as to why Rogers would have wanted to be in on this initial release... The unit would have sold like hotcakes, and Rogers probably would have ended up with a whole slew of new activations, before the novelty wore off.
The iPhone coming to Canada even tomorrow is going to be far less of a novelty than it would have been if it had arrived on June 29th.
As for the data rates, I really don't see this is as much of an issue as people seem to think. Yes, Rogers data rates are horribly high, but AT&T's weren't much better (by U.S. standards, that is). I remember talking to most of my colleagues at MWSF when the iPhone was announced, and many of them were looking to get the iPhone activated on T-Mobile so as not to get raped by Cingular/AT&T's much higher data rates.
Despite this, to everybody's surprise, AT&T released an unlimited plan, which nobody expected. The reason they could do this was actually very simple... The iPhone can't actually
consume much data... The limitations on the device pretty much guarantee this.... You can't tether it to a laptop, you can't download large files, you can't even
attach more than one picture at a time to an e-mail message, and you can't add third-party apps that might allow for these types of things. Further, the iPhone jumps onto the nearest WiFi point automatically at the slightest hint of service, so if you have a WiFi network at home, school or work, you'd pretty much have to
force it to use the EDGE network (and most would likely never bother to do this).
The bottom line is that there's a very finite and predictable amount of usage that is going to come out of an iPhone. With it's current feature set, the basic 25MB plan that Rogers laughably used to bill as "unlimited" would probably be more than sufficient for an iPhone. Rogers could release an "unlimited iPhone plan" (which is exactly what AT&T did -- released an iPhone-
specific plan), and rest easy knowing that the average iPhone user will probably never use more than 10MB of bandwidth a month, and even a user who was actually
trying would be unlikely to use anything more than the 25MB they used to allocate to the high-end data plans. This is likely the only reason that an "unlimited" plan was ever palatable even to AT&T.
