I bought my iPhone almost a year ago, shortly after it first became available in Canada. At first, ‘available’ was an exaggeration. I didn’t pre-order because at first I couldn’t even get a straight answer as to whether I could get an iPhone; I have a flat rate, legacy Fido plan called City Fido that Rogers hates, and at first it appeared I couldn’t have both City Fido and the iPhone. After the confusion passed, I was able to get the thing, but by then they were few and far between. Those of us who wanted them were calling random stores, getting on waiting lists, wandering around obscure malls. A friend at work got lucky in the basement mall of an office tower, but no joy for me. Eventually I did the boring thing and ordered over the phone. I got my phone some time in August.

The thrill of the brand new iPhone lasted quite a while. A smartphone virgin friend of mine just got an Android phone and emailed me to say “I feel like James Bond”. John Gruber called it “our flying car”. You can suddenly do things you couldn’t do before. Some of these are old things in a new context, like surfing the web on the streetcar, and some are simply radically improved old things, like texting without needing T9 input. But the most interesting things are things you have never done – following your moving location dot on a map, which I still find myself doing whenever I’m in a cab. Using Shazam to get the phone to identify songs. Google Voice Search. That shit blew people’s minds, mine included.

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Here’s the executive update on what’s happened since our last post. (July 7 – now even more updated!)

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Wow, note-taking has rocketed ahead a few decades while I was jotting down notes by actually typing like a sucka. I use an assorted hodegpodge of notetaking and organizational tools, because I’ve yet to find one that does everything, but mostly I use Backpack since it makes it easy to organize things by project. (However, I don’t necessarily recommend it since the $5/month plan I currently enjoy is no longer offered.)

Now I just became aware of a couple interesting, high tech note-taking tools. One is evernote. The big twist here is OCR, which I guess has advanced to ‘good enough’ status over the last few years. So with evernote, you can simply hold up a piece of paper to your computer’s iSight, or take a picture with your phone, and the image will be eaten by evernote and scanned for text. Then it will be searchable. I’ve tried it and it did okay with a page from Now Magazine, but I have a feeling it might choke on my handwriting, which is a cross between sanskrit and semaphore.

It has all the usual features, including tagging and emailing notes to yourself. It makes it easy to grab things off web pages. It also has a robust desktop version (both for PC and Mac) that syncs effortlessly with the cloud, something I wish backpack did without recourse to third party apps. Anyway if you want to give ‘er a shot, I have some invite codes I can send out.

The other, potentially more mind-blowing service is Jott. It’s all about voice recognition. So you sign up, register your phone number, and make note of the number you need to call (yes, it works in Canada). When you call and record a message, it converts it into text and emails it to you.

The beauty of the thing is that it will play nice with other services. You could set it up with your secret Evernote email address and turn your random blatherings into a searchable archive. It will deal with wordpress, blogger &c, but sadly not textpattern or I’d totally be dialing in some posts.

Or – SPECIAL AWESOME ALERT, this works beautifully – you can set it up with your Google Calendar account, tell yourself “2pm tomorrow poutine-eating marathon”, and if you’ve got your SMS notifications all set up, google will text your hungry ass tomorrow and remind you. It’s like having a freaking secretary. Now I just need to get it to respond to the voice cue “Diane” and I’ll finally be living my fantasy of being Agent Cooper in Twin Peaks.

And as Waylon Jennings says, ladies love outlaws. But is it worth it? I’ve been looking into this because I WANT IT BADLY, and I thought it worthwhile to share the fruits of my research.

The iPhone is not officially available here. Why? Glad you asked, Jimmy! Rogers is the only network that could carry the iPhone, as it’s a GSM device and only Rogers and subsidiary Fido are GSM in Canada. So odds are the negotiations between Apple and Rogers have stalled. The arrangements Apple wants are not typical in the industry; Rogers does not currently have an unlimited data plan and is probably reluctant to offer one.

The iPhone trademark in Canada is actually held by a different company, so that could be an issue too, although I find the Rogers explanation more convincing.

All that said, you can still get an iPhone and use it in Canada. You can go buy one in the US and then unlock it via software, or take it to be unlocked somewhere (I’m looking at you, Pacific Mall), or you can buy an unlocked iPhone off Craigslist – at about a hundred dollar premium. Once the phone is unlocked, a Rogers or Fido SIM card can be put into it and it will work perfectly (well, visual voicemail won’t work, but everything else will).

There are downsides, of course. First of all, you will have to use the phone on Rogers, and the data plans are truly fearsome. There are no unlimited data plans; the “unlimited” browsing plan doesn’t apply to the iPhone; the top data plan (as far as I could tell) costs $80 for 500 megabytes a month, which you could crack pretty easily depending on what you’re doing with it.

Also, you will get no support from anyone, and if it stops working, you’ve got a very expensive brick. And it’s more than possible that future software upgrades will indeed brick the phone – it’s happened before.

Finally, there’s a decent chance a legit Rogers-version iPhone will be released in the coming months. There are currently rumours of a 3G iPhone coming in June to Rogers – not only would the data be much faster on such a model, it could very well come with a better data plan than your grey-market gadget would ever get. That would also mean your resell value would plummet.

Then again, rumours have been swirling for the past year that the Canadian iPhone release was imminent, and it has yet to happen. But I’d be surprised if it wasn’t released before Christmas this year, as that’s prime phone-selling season. Also, Apple wants to bring the iPhone to Japan around then, which would mean they’d have to make a CDMA model, which would mean Telus or Bell could grab the iPhone instead of Rogers.

So what should you do? Depends on what you want. Occasional Robot contributor Nigel wanted his phone and iPod to be one and the same, and didn’t care about the data stuff – so he got an iPhone and is thrilled with it. I’m more interested in the always-on rich net access, so I’m thinking of going with a Touch for the time being. If only HydroOne’s Toronto-wide WiFi network wasn’t such garbage, at $20 a month it would certainly put any Rogers data plan to shame. And if the legit Canuck iPhone is released, I can still sell the Touch or give it to my lady friend.

Maybe I’m just not an outlaw at heart.

Rogers Communications Inc. has rolled out “blue” t-shirts, but critics are saying the company’s shirts are anything but.

Rogers spokeswoman Elizabeth Hamilton said the shirts reflect the changing state of the t-shirt marketplace.

“We’re in the business of offering high-value services to customers.”

Critics say the shirts are, in fact, red.

“What appears to be a good shirt on the surface comes with some serious caveats,” wrote Marc Lostracco, assistant editor of the Torontoist website. “Customers need to remember that a company calling something ‘blue’ doesn’t actually make it so.”

Hamilton disputed the criticism and said the shirts fit the uses that customers were asking for.

“It’s actually quite good value,” she said.

So yeah, that’s pretty much the gist of it, wouldn’t you say? I thought it was pretty clear what unlimited meant in the context of cellphone data plans, but Rogers sure doesn’t think so. Shit like this keeps us Canucks in the technological ghetto, as Steve notes.

My GF was a vigourous Facebook refusenik – until last night, when I got a friend request from her. Shocked and appalled, I demanded an explanation. It was forthcoming, and simple; a friend of hers who has moved to Vancouver suggested she sign up to keep up with her life out there, since she “never calls”. Which is true, because it’s expensive, Lucy points out.

This strikes me as another possible reason why Facebook is so popular in Canada.

Canada’s cellphone voice plans are just as suck as their data plans. I was just reviewing the major carriers’ plans; you’re hard pressed to find a 400 minute plan from any of them. AT&T’s plans start at 450 minutes and are no extra charge for long distance, whereas Rogers hits you with 30 cents a minute long distance charge on top of the airtime fees.

So given that, and the following:

a) young Canadians are more likely to have only a cell and no landline,
b) young Canadians, especially those at university or recent graduates, are likely to have friends from all over the country,

you have a perfectly reasonable explanation of why so many more Canadians use Facebook than Americans.