What was cause for celebration a few weeks ago has turned into a national embarrassment and another reminder that the Canadian mobile marketplace is not yet a very competitive one.

The new plans announced by Rogers are not consistent with plans being offered south of the border by AT&T or in other countries where plans include unlimited data for around $30/month.

The Rogers iphone plan starts around $60 before system charges and other fees. It does include talk time… but only 150 minutes.  You also have a data limit of 400 megs of data… which is not a lot considering the iphone is heavily dependant on data for all their widgets and the average iphone user uses 8 of them on a regular basis.  

Americans on AT&T get 3 times more talk time and unlimited data for about the same price 

Even the Rogers heavy usage plan doesn’t offer unlimited data. Since the announcement and subsequent consumer backlash, they have now indicated that customers can use other “smartphone” plans instead of the announced iphone plans. For example, I could transfer my blackberry rates (~$100/month for data alone) to the iphone. Again, no big deal and still substantially more expensive than other iphone plans offered in other countries.

Wait at least a month if you still really want one and here’s why…

Bell just announced that they will be releasing the new Samsung Instinct on August 8th which will include an unlimited data plan. The Instinct is a touch-based phone like the iphone and offers many of the same features. The user experience isn’t quite as great as the iphone… but it’s a great alternative. Thanks to Kate for sending a tweet on that announcement yesterday!

I wouldn’t be surprised if Telus came out with a similar data plan for their HTC or other smartphone products too… which means Rogers will likely update their plans if they don’t reach their targets with the iphone.

There are two more reasons to wait to buy that iphone…

1. The Rogers deal to sell the iphone isn’t exclusive - which means another GSM provider can sell it. With at least one new carrier coming to Canada after the current spectrum auction finishes up in the next few weeks, it’s almost a certainty that they’ll be GSM based. Expect them to be in market later this year or early next
2. The iphone is a great device… but what makes it really super awesome are all the utilities, enhancements, and UI hacks available for those who were brave enough to jailbreak it.  As of today, there is no jailbreaking solution for the new 3G iphone… but it’s only a matter of time

If you haven’t made the dash to Buffalo or some other U.S. border town already to buy a first generation iphone, you can probably stand to wait a month or two for better rates and more flexibility in customizing & personalizing it.

In the meantime, feel free to join the following online petitions against the new Rogers plans:

• 
• Petitiononline.com

Finally the wait is over.

Your new iphone is coming July 11th and it’s twice as fast as the one you bought in Buffalo a year ago and half the price - making this a device made for the masses.

It’s also coming with pretty much everything we were hoping for. My predictions were mostly right - 7.5 out of 9. The .5 was for saying the new phone would look different… I guessed that the new battery for 3G would make it a thicker device and we now know it will be thinner!

Some are disappointed that the new iphone isn’t coming with a front facing camera (for video chat), or a flash - or even a better camera. Nokia has a 5 meg camera with the N95… couldn’t we at least have a 3 meg camera?

Mobileme is a new feature that looks really interesting. Similar to other services i’ve seen such as SugarSync, Mobile me essentially allows you to synchronize your email, contacts, calendar and documents across multiple computers and your iphone. It also comes with push email - so like the blackberry, you will be instantly notified when email comes in. You even get your own login at me.com (I wonder how much they paid for that domain!) where you can access all your info through a web interface - much like MS Exchange today if you are on a corporate infrastructure.

Besides the business / enterprise updates, there wasn’t much to get excited about on the software front - but that’s ok. The official and non-official developer communities will fill in any missing pieces like they did with the first generation phone.

Having said that, it’s very cool that loopt is now part of the iphone 2.0 platform. Loopt is a mobile social networking platform that incorporates location. I blogged about this months ago here when i said the future of social networking is creepy. At the time i was more jazzed about a similar product from Alcatel called geopepper.

What is interesting is that Steve Jobs used the Treo 750 and Nokia N95 as comparison devices for loading webpages. It’s interesting because he didn’t mention 2 new products that will challenge Apple for downloading speed; the new blackberry bold and thunder (expected to be out this fall) as well as the new Nokia N96 which is a faster & updated version of the N95.

The new iphone, or iphone 2.0 or 3G iphone is a huge leap forward from the first version released over a year ago, but it’s still not the mostly technically advanced or sophisticated when compared to devices that are already on the market.

Having said that, who cares.

It’s not about the technology, it’s about the experience. Like I’ve said before, a great user experience will trump great technology and Apple has improved on something that was already pretty super awesome.

Why is that good news for Marketers?

Consider this… 98 percent of iphone users are browsing online, 94 percent are using email and 90 percent are texting. Approximately 80 percent are using 10 or more of the phone’s features.

For marketers who think mobile marketing is only about text 2 win campaigns, the introduction of the iphone and other competing products this year will make the mobile device a rich environment to acquire, retain, or grow customers beyond the 100,000 or so iphones that already migrated here in the last year.

I’ve recently installed the Weather Network blackberry widget on my Blackberry 8800. One of the advantages of creating a device specific widget is that you can enrich the user experience beyond a typical mobile website.

The Weather Network is no exception - taking full advantage of the blackberry Java platform to delivery an intuitive and easy to manage widget.

Once you’ve downloaded the widget, you can select your city of choice for weather updates. Coming soon - the ability to add up to 5 more cities - although I believe there should be an unlimited city option like there is on the iphone weather widget by Yahoo.

The neat thing is that once your choice city has been selected, you can get the current temperature by just scrolling over the icon on your blackberry desktop. Clicking on the icon will give you a detailed forecast for that day. Using the options button, you can switch to short and long term forecasts too.

Want to try it out? Point your blackberry mobile web browser to: http://weyebb.pelmorex.com

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At first glance, the pcEdge had a similar “wow” factor as the Polymer device that featured a roll-up / out screen as profiled here and seen as the WMC in February.

With only rumours of the 3G iphone coming in June and no sign of any real iphone killer or really fantastic next generation blackberry, this is the one device that stuck out the most to me this week.

It looks like a motorola razr - but much larger with an impressive 6 inch by 3 inch display and about 1/2 inch thick. That’s about double the screen space as the iphone.  It’s thin, it looks cool… but it falls short in my opinion of being a must have device.

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Today’s keynote address at CTIA was Sir Richard Branson who talked about doing things his way. He brought us on a 30 minute journey through the many bold successes Virgin has had. The highlight of his presentation was when he proclaimed that his next project once Virgin Galactic takes off is to build a modern day ”Noah’s Ark” for space that will send animals, seeds and 30 volunteers to travel to Mars for what he described could be a one way ticket.  

April fools joke or yet another bold project for the future?

Although his proclamation sounded more like a joke than a vision for the future - this wouldn’t be the first time he has gone against “the experts” to boldly go where no company has gone before (sorry, couldn’t resist).

Other things I’ve picked up on over the first two days:

1. If you lend you iphone to a stranger to make a local call, be sure to keep them within eyesight… or give them a quarter to make a call. Last night a stranger at an industry party walked away with my iphone. Good thing there’s an Apple store across the street from the hotel!
2. Much like the North American mobile industry, so much has changed in Vegas since I was last here two years ago. It’s truly remarkable to see the number of new buildings, casinos, and condos from 2 years ago. Even more remarkable are the massive projects currently under-way that will completely transform the infamous strip into something even more excessive. One project called the City Centre will have it’s own water treatment plant and power station. It looks like a series of 10 buildings that start at the strip and extend to the other side of the main highway. They have their own private monorail system for the place too.
3. Nothing new from blackberry this week…except a few more colour options for the pearl.
4. Although CTIA Wireless is the largest mobile event in North America, it pales in comparison to size and scale of the world mobile congress
5. 48 billion SMS messages are sent per month in the U.S.!!!

Time to catch a nap before heading over the i love the mobile web launch party!

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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Steve Levy, President of Market Research in Eastern Canada for IPSOS Reid, declared at this week’s CMA digital marketing conference that there is no mobile marketing in Canada. According to their research, 27% of Canadian marketers agree that mobile marketing will be very important in the future with 9% indicating they are practicing it now. Steve indicated he didn’t know how anybody could actually be doing mobile marketing now as Canadian carriers don’t yet support it.

I had an opportunity to speak with Steve after his presentation and suggested that his definition of Mobile Marketing was likely different from the 9% practicing it in Canada today.

He pointed out that when he walks by a retail outlet he doesn’t get coupons or messaging sent to his mobile device - which is how he defines mobile marketing. His definition really refers to location based services (LBS) or sometimes referred to as location based messaging (LBM). LBS / LBM does work in Canada across all carriers for those with built-in GPS in their devices (like the Blackberry 8800), but all the examples I’ve worked with require you to download a supporting application to your mobile device to make it work. Related to this are QR Codes (or Quick Response Codes) which are already rampant in other countries. Oh, another interesting stat from the Ipsos-Reid survey, 29% of marketers believe that QR Codes will be a part of many campaigns in the next three years. I’ll cover more on LBS & QR Codes in an upcoming article.

Mobile Marketing is more than LBS and QR Codes, although it is true that the future of Mobile Marketing could revolve around them.

Mobile Marketing is about creating conversations and creating engagement with audiences through the Mobile channel. Put another way, mobile marketing is about amplifying branded events, extending product or service experiences and extending the reach of a campaign which may already include TV, print, web, and email.

When I give an overview of Mobile Marketing to our clients, I tend to break it out into four channels:

1) SMS (or text messaging) & MMS

2) Downloading (ringtones, video & images) & Applications

3) Mobile Web

4) Mobile advertising

Of course others may define or categorize the mobile channel a bit differently, but I’ve found that using this approach can bring clarity and focus to your conversations. Over the coming weeks, I’ll provide my point of view of how to leverage each of these channels into your marketing mix. This year’s CMA conference had its moments, but I’m looking forward to next year’s conference where I’m expecting a location based message to be delivered from centre stage.

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.