Today is the beginning of the “Auction of Spectrum Licences for Advanced Wireless Services and Other Spectrum in the 2 GHz Range“.
Huh?
What this means is that Industry Canada is basically paving the way for some fresh blood to enter the Canadian Wireless (cellular) space. This should translate into some competition for the ‘big 3′ (Rogers, Bell & Telus) in this country as 40% of the available spectrum is earmarked for new players to start offering wireless services possibly as soon as early next year.
It’s unclear how long the auction will last and who all the bidders are but it seems to be a number of communications companies across the country, including Shaw Communications. Hopefully there are rules preventing someone from Shaw winning the auction only to be bought up by Rogers or Bell in a few years time, effectively killing off the competition. This has happened in the past when Rogers bought Fido, Telus bought Clearnet, etc.
Possibly not so coincidentially, today Bell began offering ‘unlimited data’ for $30/month on all of their smartphones - previously it was only available on specific models or non-smartphones (wap only).
Could this be the beginning of the decline of high data prices in Canada? My money is still on June 9th as the main turning point when Apple is expected to outline the iPhone rollout in Canada among many other countries.
UPDATE: Wirelessnorth.ca has a lot more details about the auction with daily play by plays of the bids.
There has been a lot of talk and speculation about the rumoured 3G iPhone as well as when it will launch in Canada since the ‘if’ part has been established (’later this year’) and how much the data plan might cost to Canadians. I figured I’d throw my thoughts out there and see how close I get it later.
Prediction #1: Details about the iPhone release in Canada will be announced on June 9th
Steve Jobs himself will announce them during the WWDC Keynote as he reveals the next iteration of the iPhone (version 2.0/3G/whatever) and details the rollout of the iPhone to a number of other countries/carriers that also had similarly worded (brief) press releases regarding the iPhone coming out “later this year”.
It’s interesting to note that a number of ’soon-to-be-carrying-iPhone’ countries have been mentioned previously in various places like Apple’s shareholder meetings well in advance of their official rollout - except for Canada.
Prediction #2: Rogers will offer the 3G iPhone to Canadians.
It makes sense that Rogers would want to negate the thousands of unlocked iPhones already in Canada by selling the latest version. This would mean that all current iPhones (mine included) would still work but would potentially be locked out of any sweet data deal (more on that in a second) since the 1st gen iPhone wasn’t offered by Rogers.
Prediction #3: there will be a decent iPhone data plan for Canadians.
There has been a lot of talk about IMEI tracking, user agent string logging and other forms of identifying users on the Rogers network in order to charge them for using data via 3rd party applications and non-sanctioned websites. I have a hard time believing Apple would allow Rogers to sell the iPhone without some kind of decent data plan….perhaps not quite as generous as the AT&T plan ($20/month all you can eat data) but even that could change down south with the release of the SDK built 3rd party apps via the iTunes App Store that will also be unveiled at WWDC. The bottomline is that Rogers will have to offer a compelling data plan, targeted at consumers, not businessmen, if they hope to sell a decent number of these phones. Canada is a relatively small market for high(er) end phones in the first place, so it has to be decent to get any kind of penetration with the Facebook generation. Just look at how many non-businessman currently have Blackberry Pearls - mostly for email and Facebook.
Prediction #4: the Canadian iPhone will sell for no more than $399 with a two year contract and be available before the end of the summer, if not immediately.
They will make the iPhone available very quickly in order to not slow down sales. Dragging out the release would only cause people to hold off on new activations or give competitors a chance to steal potentials away from Rogers with sweet deals. Despite it being Rogers modus operandi to do everything with a 3 year contract these days, because of the way Apple will require them to sell the iPhones, there won’t be a requirement for a 3 year deal, a 2 year deal will be required. There has been a lot of rumours that AT&T will be offering the iPhone for $199 with a 2 year contract once the 3G version comes out so I could see Rogers doing something similar but with a higher markup than AT&T. It just really depends on what the 3G version looks like from a specs standpoint and what it offers above and beyond the 1st gen model.
I’m still not convinced that 3G is all that great having used Edge in a lot of places, it’s not that bad for many things you’d want to do on the iPhone and would rather have slower internet speeds than a battery-killing 3G speed any day. I still don’t believe that videophone capabilities will really matter that much to most people. I personally don’t know anybody that either has a video capable phone or would even use that feature if they did. Streaming video is another story completely and could be a more compelling reason for 3G.
Prediction #5: I could be completely wrong about all of this.
One of the fun things about Apple announcements is that more often than not, they find a way to make people that predict what they are going to announce look foolish. They do it again and again.
So I’m not putting any money on my predictions. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens on June 9th.
Beginning tomorrow, Rogers will begin offering the Nokia N95 8gb smartphone to Canadians.
This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s the first time in North America that this model phone is offered - previously only available unlocked directly from Nokia. As I mentioned previously in my post about the iPhone coming to Canada, Rogers isn’t known (to me at least) for being the first on the block to offer new mobile tech so this is a positive step in the right direction for them.
If I didn’t already have an iPhone, the N95 is probably the phone I’d be using right now. It has a really nice 5 megapixel camera (with flash!) and can also shoot video which can be streamed via Qik.com. GPS is integrated as is Wifi and features a very hackable S60 operating system.
The only caveats I’ve heard of with the device is the short battery life and some clunky software. I’m not sure how it would perform using it the way I use my iPhone so I tend to discount battery issues until I get my hands on one - I get 2-3 days per charge with my iPhone with wifi and bluetooth enabled all the time but I’m not streaming video or powering a flash.
The press release also mentions the unlimited browsing with the Vision mobile plan (and a 3 year contract). I wonder if this means that software like Qik are included? My guess is that only using the built in browser is supported and third party apps aren’t included. I guess we’ll see once people start pushing the limits of the data plan with an ‘official’ phone and not an unlocked one being used on the network.
Things are definitely getting interesting in the Canadian mobile market.
Thanks to BlueFur for the reminder.
Even though the iPhone SDK has been out for awhile now, there are still lots of people cranking out some cool apps for jailbroken iPhones. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in June when things get a lot more official from Apple with the availability of the SDK-developed apps. But until then, here are a couple of ones that I’ve been playing around with lately.
While you could FTP these into your iPhone, the easiest way to get these apps is via the Installer app. If you have a jailbroken iPhone, you probably already have it.
Customize 2.0
Very recently updated and released, Customize is one of my favorite apps. It lets you, um, customize a lot of aspects of the iPhone. Everything from the color of the buttons to the text of “slide to unlock” can be changed via this app. I did have a problem getting it running on my 1.1.3 version iPhone (it would crash on loading) but there is a patch on Installer (under Tweaks for 1.1.3) called SUID Lib Fix that made it work. There is now a theme preview option built in to Customize that lets you view screenshots and individual images for the various themes and filesets before you install them. There are over 800 themes to browse and tons of individual images, sounds and sets to tweak your iPhone with.
Snapture
There has been a couple of different apps that extend the iPhone’s camera but Snapture is my favorite (and it’s freeware). Packed with features, some highlights include a digital zoom slider, color or B&W photos, up to 3 pictures can be taken in a row in multishot mode - perfect for those self portraits where you can’t see the screen and one of my favorite features is that the whole screen becomes a shutter button instead of having to try to hold the iPhone in one hand while you’ve got a finger on the Home button - an accident waiting to happen.
It’s a little buggy but a new version just came out today so it continues to get better.
Twinkle
A location aware Twitter client. It features a slick presentation not unlike the web version of PocketTweats but also locates you and enables you to see who else is using Twinkle near you. Kind cool and kinda creepy….but could be useful to use at a conference like SXSW. You can also add a photo (which doesn’t show in the actual Twitter timeline - just to other users of Twinkle).
It’s also a pretty nice Twitter client but is still subject to the API issues that Twitter is prone to have.
It’s about time.
Unfortunately no details other than it’s coming ‘before the end of the year’.
The big questions to me are:
- How much for the phone itself in Canada?
- what does the data and voice plans look like? They better resemble the US pricing
- How long do we have to lock in? Rogers seems to like 3 year terms
- Will it be the rumoured new 3G model or as Rogers tends to be behind in releasing phones, will it be last year’s model
I’m sure there are many more questions that will come once more information is made available. This announcement seems to fly in the face of the previous (rumoured) reasons no announcements were made from Rogers concerning upcoming releases would harm current unit sales….I would think if you’re on the fence/want an iPhone/want a new phone period, you’re going to wait for more information, effectively hurting sales now.
I guess this is progress so I should be happy….so why am I expecting the worst?
UPDATE: Watch Boris Mann talk about the iPhone announcement on CTV Newsnet from earlier today.
Today Apple released the latest firmware for the iPhone taking it up to 1.1.4. Unfortunately, as usual, their details on what was updated is beyond sparse with ‘bug fixes’ being the only description at this time. Hopefully this also means the SDK is imminent.
It didn’t take long before people upgraded and tried the ZiPhone app (for PC or Mac) and it *appears* to work….it’s too early to say if anything is broken so give it a couple of days before you go and upgrade. Keep an eye on Zibri’s site for updates straight from the source.
Oh and yeah, I like my new wallpaper too. Punch it, Chewie!
During the Northern Voice Opening Party, Chris Heur asked if he could do a quick interview with me. Chris was doing this to capture the event by talking to as many people as possible and asking them a couple of questions. He simply used his cellphone and a service called Utterz to record the interview and it automagically posted it to his blog, twitter and to his Utterz page (and possibly other places). He also managed to take a decent photo of me which is pretty much a miracle.
Hopefully I sound as cool as everyone else he interviewed during his trip to Vancouver. Thanks Chris…it was a fun thing to participate in and a cool way to capture the people attending the conference.
Just upgraded successfully from 1.1.1 to 1.1.3 using this tutorial.
Modified steps I used:
- sync to backup your stuff
- download and restore to 1.1.3 using the Option Restore method in the tutorial
- after about 10 minutes or so, you are at iTunes saying your SIM isn’t valid. Tutorial says to start the command line steps, I skipped them and just used the GUI version (see #2 post in the tutorial)
- check all options (jailbreak, activate and unlock) in the GUI app and wait 2.5 minutes for it to complete
- you should have a working iPhone but possibly no cell service - just reboot the iPhone and it should ‘just work’
Note this will UNLOCK any phone. If you walk into an Apple Store today, the method above will unlock it so you can use it on any network without having to buy some kind of SIM hack (ala Turbo/StealthSIM).
Small warning: We tried this method on a Vista machine (obviously using the PC version of the software) and the unlock portion didn’t work but it did activate and jailbreak the phone at 1.1.3. Tried the same iPhone on a Mac with the GUI tool and it worked so if you can, use a Mac (or possibly XP). It could have just been my friend’s Vista install causing the problems so YMMV.
Update: If you already have an older firmware installed (and activated), you can simply upgrade to 1.1.3 via iTunes then run the ZiPhone app. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
It’s not for the faint of heart, but there is now a method to take a new, 1.1.3 out of the box iPhone (including the new 16gb models) and unlock it via software.
Technically you have to jailbreak, downgrade, unlock, upgrade, and jailbreak but it appears to now be possible. The credit goes to George Hotz, who was originally responsible for figuring out the original hardware unlock last summer.
Be careful out there as there is currently no ‘easy’ tutorial (yet) and the usual caveats apply.
Via MacWorld and TUAW and just about every other iPhone related site on the internet.
UPDATE: Well, that didn’t take long.
UPDATE 2: Looks like ZiPhone is sweeping the internets. PC or Mac tutorials for you! Also check out iphone.unlock.no for a different GUI version. I don’t even care anymore who the original content is on this stuff….so many leech blogs hoover up my posts as well as the tutorials I can’t keep track.
UPDATE: This post is now obsolete - see this one for the simple, easy method.
I haven’t tried it yet but the iPhone forums seem to be abuzz with people successfully upgrading their iPhones to the latest firmware (1.1.3) and software unlocks still working. Thanks to Nate True, there is a software jailbreak method now available for 1.1.3.
Detailed instructions for Mac users (the title tag is wrong) and for PC users.
Nate’s site has the instructions but this one has screenshots of the entire process so that should be more reassuring….although don’t blame me if you’re left with a nice Apple branded paper weight when you’re done - make sure you READ EVERYTHING before you do it as there are some issues with certain versions of iPhones (baseband and unlock method) - you’ve been warned!
I’ll probably try it out this weekend and will post back here when I’m done.
UPDATE: Nate has posted a FAQ for helping those that have attempted the jailbreak and run into problems. You should avoid this method if you have a PowerPC Mac as well.
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