Category — i-phone

Many people buy Apple products because they are great fashion accessories.

The ultimate fashion accessory was big news last week as Steve Jobs announced the much anticipated SDK (software developer kit) for the iphone which will allow developers to create applications, utilities, and games leveraging the same platform Apple used to create their own widgets. Starting in June of this year, consumers won’t have to “jailbreak” their phone in order to customize it.

Also starting this June, enterprise users will no longer have to beg their I.T. / technical support department to open up the corporate email server to hackers and SPAM attacks in order for them to access their email from their nifty iphone.

The iphone will be getting some proper business chops.  

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Rogers is expected to go live shortly with a new data pricing structure that will offer unlimited data for just $20 a month under a new plan called the “communicate value pack” ….which is very similar to the ~20/ month plan offered by AT&T in the U.S. for those with an iphone.

Bell has been offering $7 unlimited data for months now - albeit on their slower 1x network.

This is good news for consumers in Canada looking for affordable packages….and certainly could be interpreted as a signal that the iphone will be coming to Canada this spring as speculated in this blog.

After calling Rogers today to change my data plan to their new $65 / 1 gig a month plan, I was enlightened by two things:

1. Their $80 / 500 meg plan a month was still the best plan available for a consumer mobile device on Rogers. The $65 / 1 GIG plan is available only for their Air Cards - or PCMCIA cards that you stick into your laptop to get Internet access when wifi is not available. Apparently switching to the Air Card program can brick your mobile device.
2. The Rogers CSR indicated that consumer data plans for mobile devices will be dropping again soon - most likely this spring.

Why wait until the spring to further reduce data plan rates?

The reason is simple - Rogers won’t lower their rates until they absolutely have to. Even with cheaper plans now available on Telus and Bell, there hasn’t been a notable customer migration away from Rogers. 

Everybody knows that Rogers will be carrying the iphone when it eventually comes here.

Rogers will likely continue to charge higher rates until the iphone arrives as Apple mandates that cheap or fixed rates are offered - similar to what we’ve seen from AT&T and other European carriers.

I’d wager a loonie that springtime will be our time to finally get the iphone.

Today Canadians everywhere waited with baited breath for news from the MacWorld 2008 Conference and Expo in San Francisco that the iPhone would finally be coming to Canada to a Rogers plan near you.

That news never came

Industry speculation is that Rogers won’t offer fixed or cheap data plans to match what other countries have offered. While you can get an all you can eat data plan for the iphone in the U.S. for around $20 / month, the best you can do right now on Rogers is an $80 monthly plan for 500 megs of data…which sounds like a lot, but wouldn’t be enough for those who want to take full advantage of the media rich features that come standard with the iphone.

Apple wants to control every part of the user experience - so getting an unexpectedly high bill for your fancy new iphone could negatively impact brand perception and advocacy for Apple. I certainly wasn’t thrilled with the $400 bill I received from Rogers the first month after hooking up my iphone on their network.

Now the good news

As reported in the Toronto Star this week, there is a chance that Telus will make the switch from CDMA (a common format in North America) to GSM - which has been adopted by the rest of the world.  An industry source also indicated to me this week that Bell is also investigating a potential switch to GSM.

The reasons are three-fold:

1. To get a piece of the global roaming fees that are currently exclusive to Rogers
2. To get access to a wider array of mobile devices that also offer more margin and more flexible terms
3. To compete with the pending new Canadian wireless carrier who is expected to build a GSM-based network as well

More Canadian GSM-based carriers mean more competition which means more choice and better value for Canadians.

It also means when new mobile devices such as the iphone burst on to the global scene, we won’t be the last industrialized country to get it.

It also means I will no longer be one of the few in Toronto with an iphone.. but I can live with that

Tired of waiting for the iphone to arrive in Canada or tired of out-of-world expensive data plans?

Bell has quietly launched a fixed data plan with the new HTC touch mobile device.

For as little as $15 / month, consumers can get unlimited data plans as part of the Bell fun bundles.

Click on the image on the left to get a full screen shot of the comparison chart between the Bell HTC plan vs. iphone vs. the Telus HTC plan.

Although the HTC touch is no i-phone killer in terms of usability and overall cool factor, it’s an impressive looking mobile device stacked with many features that will make some geeks think twice about waiting for the iphone.

This is a pre-emptive strike from Bell to counter the hyperbole created over the iphone.

This is great news for consumers as Bell’s plan should lead to more affordable data plans across all carriers.

Marketers take note - this could mean the mobile web will finally catch on in Canada!  Could 2008 be the year of the mobile web?

I was catching up on my RSS feeds tonight and came across an update from a live blogging event, where it was announced that in addition to the fantastic iphone specific site, facebook has now released an application for BlackBerry. The application goes beyond the browsing experience and leverage’s the RIM platform. If you have neither an iphone nor BlackBerry (shame on you), you can still have a great mobile browse experience by going to m.facebook.com on your mobile device.

I went fishing for more information on this announcement and came across several announcements of pending platform improvements. Get ready for this - the three top items I’ve blogged about here and elsewhere are coming soon!

1) Newsfeed for your groups! You’ll be able to get content updates on your groups without having to visit them individually. This also likely means we’ll be able to send such updates as an RSS feed to our newsreaders - much like what the current netvibes module does today for your main profile page. I predict group participation and growth to explode as a result of this. 

2) Organize your friends (and colleagues)! Soon you’ll be able to categorize your friends and therefore have more control over what they see and how they interact with you. For those of us who have wished for a separation between personal and professional contacts, this is it. I know a few people who actually have two facebook profiles - one for their friends, and one for their professional network. This move will make it easier for people leverage the social graph for work and play.

3) Mobile platform - facebook Platform for Mobile is here allowing developers to extend their applications to work on mobile phones and devices as well.  I can hardly wait to see how developers and marketers will extend their applications to mobile.

Additionally, multi-language support is coming - which should allow the platform to finally catch on in non-English speaking countries.

Today was also an announcement that Microsoft has invested $240 million in facebook at a valuation of $15 billion (or 2% stake). This extends their existing relationship and  gives Microsoft the rights to sell ads on the facebook platform.  I wonder if they’ll extend the ad serving platform to the Mobile platform too….now that will be interesting!

Will this also give Microsoft the first right to buy facebook next year? Speculation will mount…but in the mean time i’m looking forward to some long-overdue platform updates.

Although often referred to as the “third screen” - there are actually more mobile devices (2.8 billion) world wide than internet PCs and TVs combined (2.5 billion)!  

A few reports have been released over the last week that highlight the fact that adoption continues to grow in Canada and how people (and marketers) are using Mobile devices are changing too.

Here are some highlights:

Text Messaging (SMS):  793.3 million text messages were sent in June 2007 alone - or about 26.5 million per day. 4.3 billion text messages were sent up until June of this year - which equals the total of all text messages sent in 2006. It’s very possible that we’ll see upwards of 10 billion text messages sent this year in Canada.  One reason driving this trend is the mass adoption of all you can eat SMS plans in Canada. For about $10 / month, you can text all you want.  Marketers have also been getting more into the game - there are about 300 active shortcodes in Canada right now.  Source: CWTA

Mobile Browse: With no “all you can eat” data plans yet available to the consumer in Canada, usage of Mobile browse is still pretty low at around 11%.  This is less than half the world’s average which is around 25%.  In countries where data plans are either fixed or really cheap, the mobile web has really taken off. The top 5 markets for the mobile web are the U.S., India, South Africa, UK, and Indonesia.  Also interesting is that 4 of the top 10 mobile devices in the U.S. are PDAs - three blackberry models and the Samsung blackjack.  Until the Canadian carriers offer really cheap or fixed data plans, we don’t expect the same growth in mobile web as other mobile channels. This may all change when the iphone eventually makes it way to Canada…so stay tuned!

It’s been an exciting year so far for Mobile. It may be time to start referring to mobile as the “first” screen.

Crazy…but could it be true? According to the rumour mill as posted in iPhoneHacks.com and Engadget, the i-Phone could be available for sale in Canada in the upscale retailer by the end of this Month for $799.

With the upcoming November 9th launch of the i-phone in Europe, apparently there is a push to get the phone out to Canadians around the same time if not sooner. One of the principle reasons why the i-phone has not yet made it to Canada is the fact that Rogers does not offer an all you can eat data plan. With AT&T you pay around $20 / month for an all you can eat data plan in the U.S. The top plan from Rogers is $250 / month - and there are still limitations on bandwidth…so bills can quickly escalate to several hundred or thousand a month. I’ve had my i-phone for about a month now and have received my first Rogers bill which was over $400 for low to moderate use. Data charges add up fast as the widgets such as stocks and weather will continually ping the network for updates while your i-phone is turned on…so you can rack up a big bill without doing much.

The rumour also stats that Holt Renfrew will be the sole carrier in Canada - which makes no sense unless they are launching their own MVNO off the Rogers network. Rogers is the only carrier in Canada with the GSM network required for the current i-phone iteration.  It seems unlikely that they would agree to an MVNO with Holt Renfrew on their network for such an important product.  With the recent failures of the ESPN and Walt Disney MVNOs, it’s also unlikely that Holt Renfrew would wander in this territory. Even Virgin Mobile - an MVNO on the Bell Network has had limited success in Canada. A more likely scenario is that Holt Renfrew will be selling the device as a principle retailer (much like AT&T in the U.S.) but consumers will still have to activate the phone through Rogers over i-Tunes.

The price point also seems ridiculous - especially with the Canadian dollar valued 2% more than the U.S. greenback. Many of us have made the trip to Buffalo and even with the tax imposed at the border, we had jailbreaked & unlocked i-phones on the Rogers network within minutes of getting home for around $460 Canadian.

If you are a Canadian looking for more competitive pricing from Rogers, I encourage you to sign the online petition started here. If you are interested in following news on the i-phone in Canada, add the following link to your del.ic.ious account - http://www.iphoneinfo.ca/ and http://www.iphonehacks.com

Although Holt Renfrew has carried i-pods in the past and other high end mobile devices from Nokia, you’re still more likely to get your new i-phone in Canada by driving to Buffalo or whatever border crossing is closest to you. The $$$ you’ll spend in gas and chicken wings will still outweigh the potential premium Canadians will pay for their i-phone when it eventually comes to Canada - through Holt Renfrew, Rogers, or whomever.

After nearly three months of reading reviews of the i-phone and following the efforts of the hacker community to both “jailbreak” the phone from AT&T and unlock it for use on other GSM networks, I decided it was time to make the drive to Buffalo. The $200 discounted price on the 8 meg phone was certainly appreciated - and off-set the $71 in import tax I had to pay at the border.

As a marketer, i first appreciated the simplicity and design of the packaging. It’s the kind of box you want to keep around the house and not something you’d use as part of a re-gift.  The next thing I noticed is that there were no instructions. Having lived in the PC world most of my life (and with the Atari 520 ST before that), you always expect 90% of the weight and half the package to be filled with manuals, instructions, waivers and other stuff I usually park close to the recycling box right away. Even Dell - known for their dummy-proof packaging and design ship their machines with loads of how-to paper.

What Dell, Microsoft, and other technology companies have failed to recognize is that it’s not about having the best and easiest to understand instructions, it’s about making your product so simple that you don’t need them.

The i-phone doesn’t come with any instructions for the same reason; you don’t need them. Try giving the latest Nokia, Treo, or Blackberry to a friend who has never seen them before without instructions and see how long it takes for them to get stuck and frustrated. 

There are more technically advanced phones already on the market that actually support full 3G features (like MMS), but Apple has never been a technology company first. They are a fashion company that understands that user experience or user interface design will trump technology every time.  By putting user experience ahead of everything else, Apple will continue to redefine every established market they enter.

It started with their original Mac OS - which inspired Microsoft to launch ”Windows 3.1“.  Apple redefined the portable music space with the i-pod and the introduction of i-tunes. Their devices and services have succeeded not because they are the most technically advanced, but because they are so darn simple and easy to use that users feel empowered by their devices instead of ashamed. They also look really cool as fashion accessories… so the age of geek being cool has mostly replaced what used to be the sole domain of the jock.

After spending my Saturday afternoon researching, activating and unlocking my i-phone to work on the Rogers network, i realized that once again Apple’s success with this device is not tied to their technology - but the experience.  Within minutes my email, photos, mp3s, ring tones, and contacts were synchronized. Lacking instructions, i relied on my intuition for navigating around the device and was really impressed with how incredibly simple and fun it was. Apple has even made text messaging and viewing photos a better experience by focusing on interface design. Sure there is some technical wizardry included with the i-phone… but that’s really window dressing when compared to the overall experience. 

I’m not about to trade in my HP laptop and two Dell computers for Apple equivalent products, but as a fashion accessory (and mobile device), there is nothing else i’d rather have on my belt holster then my new i-phone right now.