Canada gets unlimited mobile browsing – but not for iPhone

by Alex Zaharov-Reutt

Friday, 04 July 2008

Page 1 of 3 ! Bell Canada, one of the competitors to dominant Canadian telco Rogers, isn’t also selling the iPhone – but has just introduced unlimited $10 mobile web browsing on the Samsung Instinct. Is it a clever ploy to attract serious interest in the wake of the iPhone or doomed to disinterest? In the US, a major telecommunications company called Sprint has already released an iPhone clone called the Samsung Instinct, and while it lacks the finesse of the iPhone and is much more of a phone than any kind of mini computer as is the iPhone itself, Sprint has reported the phone has been amazingly popular. That’s likely because the iPhone isn’t available yet and doesn’t work on Sprint’s CDMA network anyway, but also because it costs less than the iPhone to buy, comes with GPS turn-by-turn navigation, looks very much like the iPhone, has video calling, and does most of its functions more than well enough, although the reviews all say the browser could be much better. Of course there is no “multi-touch” interface to zoom into and out of web pages and images, there’s no push email, there no iPhone-like App Store, there’s only 2GB of storage supplied on a MicroSD card (which can be upgraded to 8GB), the screen is smaller and the phone’s operating system isn’t as snappy or smooth as that of the iPhone. Now Bell Canada, which styles itself as Canada’s biggest wireless company (although using CDMA and EVDO against Rogers which is the biggest GSM/3G provider) will also launch the Samsung Instinct with a key feature: unlimited web browsing and web based email at just $10 per month. This is according to Canadian newspaper “The Globe and Mail” as the Bell Canada website only notes that the Instinct is “coming soon”. Now before you think that this means Canadian Instinct owners-to-be can now tether their Instinct phones to their computers to use the Internet there, sadly that will not be the case. The CAD $10 per month unlimited browsing plan is phone only, just like it is on the iPhone. Someone will probably figure out how to do it anyway, but if Bell Canada sees that your phone plan has suddenly had a large spike in Internet usage they will probably realise that you have somehow tethered your phone and you can be sure they won’t want to let you get away with it and will want to charge you. Still, just because a phone has unlimited web browsing at a cheap rate doesn’t necessarily mean it will fly off the shelves. What’s one possible solution that should come in the future, what does the phone cost to buy in Canada, and what impact might this have on Rogers and the iPhone? Please read on to page 2. << First page <   1 2 3 Next page > Last page - Post your comment >>

 

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