The Apple iPhone. (Jason DeCrow/Associated Press)

The author is a Canadian print and video freelance journalist

Apple's latest wundergadget, according to its legion of fans and admirers, is one of the greatest leaps forward in telephone design since the Touch-Tone pad replaced rotary dialing. With a record-breaking 1.4 million units sold in the three months after its much ballyhooed U.S. release in June 2007, the iPhone has been crowned head of the smart phone class. Too bad you can't buy it in Canada.

At least not officially … but there are sources for those in the know.

Cellphone aficionados have found it hard to resist the allure of the iPhone's unique mix of sleek aesthetics and user-friendly functionality, combining a scaled-down Mac computer, photo camera and video iPod — all experienced through an intuitive, multi-touch colour screen. Still, despite strong potential demand and persistent rumours to the contrary, the iPhone is nowhere near being made available in Canada through the country's carriers.

Apple's revolutionary cellphone has apparently not yet found a Canadian telecom suitor. Rogers and its subsidiary, Fido, are the only wireless carriers that use the iPhone-compatible global system for mobile (GSM) radio frequency. (Bell and Telus use a different broadcasting standard.) But Rogers so far hasn't inked a deal with Apple to carry the phone here. However, this hasn't stopped some Canadian merchants from buying the device in the U.S., "unlocking" it from the AT&T network — the only authorized North American iPhone carrier — and reselling it to tech-loving Rogers or Fido clients, usually with a significant markup.

Nitin Behal, who runs the CellSpeed phone shop in Toronto's North York neighbourhood, sells between 10 and 20 iPhones a week at $799 each — nearly twice what they sell for in the United States. For $100 a pop, he also provides unlocking services and adds a bundle of several popular (but unauthorized) third-party applications that he said improve the iPhone experience.

"People don't mind paying a bit more if it saves them the hassle of going to the U.S., then unlocking and customizing the phone themselves," he said. "It's been our most popular item since it came out."

Rogers and its subsidiary, Fido, are the only wireless carriers in Canada that use the iPhone-compatible global system for mobile (GSM) radio frequency. (Akira Suemori/AP)

Behal isn't fazed by Apple's multiple counter-offensives against the owners of an estimated 250,000 iPhones that have been unlocked and taken off the AT&T grid. The Cupertino, Calif.-based company has fought back against grey market users by releasing several software updates that, once installed, "brick" modified iPhones (that is, render them useless as bricks), requiring further software hacking.

This has upset many of Apple's famously loyal customers, including many AT&T subscribers who decided to hack into their iPhones simply to add their choice of third-party software applications, a practice that Apple has said it will only allow once its official iPhone software developer kit is released sometime in February 2008.

"Apple can try, but they can't stop people from using their phone however they want," Behal said. "There's another software update [version 1.1.2] that will be available through iTunes that's supposed to stop people from using modified iPhones, but it won't last. Hackers will find a way around it — and actually, if you don't accept the update, your phone won't even be affected."

Behal doesn't understand why there isn't a bigger North American consumer backlash against Apple, AT&T or any of the phone makers or services provider that try to dictate how and where a mobile phone can be used.

"In Europe and Asia, you can use any phone on a compatible network," he said.

He noted that Apple is currently in the midst of launching the iPhone in the United Kingdom, Germany and France, where locking phones to a single network is illegal.

"Technically, there's nothing illegal about unlocking a phone in Canada or the U.S., but the companies don't tell you how to do it so most people end up buying a new phone if they change service provider."

That may be changing in the wake of a recent class-action lawsuit settlement in the U.S. by major telecom company Sprint Nextel, which now must provide departing Sprint PCS clients with the access code necessary to unlock their wireless handsets.

Apple is currently facing several lawsuits in the U.S., including a similar $1.2 billion class-action suit for purported anti-trust activities related to its locking the iPhone to AT&T's network, and its allegedly premeditated attempts to brick the phones of hundreds of thousands of users through its software update. The lawyers behind the suit have set up a website, appleiphonelawsuit.com, where bricked iPhone users living in California can add their names to the list of litigants.

Another factor delaying Apple's foray into Canadian telephony is that, since 2004, the "iPhone" trademark has been registered in Canada to an internet telephone company called Comwave, which uses the name to market its voice-over-internet protocol (VoIP) services. However, Apple faced a similar battle in the United States against Cisco Systems and eventually settled out of court.

Whatever the eventual outcome, legal experts say it's still unlikely that locking a phone to a particular wireless carrier will be deemed illegal in either the U.S. or Canada.

But even if the iPhone was no longer locked and was available in Canada, the high rates charged by Canadian service providers, especially for data access, remains a major hurdle to widespread smart phone use.

"The cost isn't cheap," said Todd Maffin, a technology expert and CBC Radio host who owns an iPhone. He said Fido's $100 data plan is the most sensible, since it allows up to 200 megabytes a month of data transfer.

"I find I use about 100 megabytes per month, so that's enough for me. But that $100 is in addition to your regular cellphone costs, which makes the iPhone prohibitively expensive for most people in Canada."

In the U.S, the basic AT&T monthly iPhone service plan is $59 US. T-Mobile, Germany's official iPhone network, has announced monthly rate plans starting at €49 (about $67 Cdn).

Nevertheless, despite having to purchase his iPhone online through the Craiglist.org classified ad website and spend several hours hacking its software, Maffin said it was worth it for the exceptional built-in web browser — unlike what he called the "lousy webpage rendering and confusing interfaces" of so many other cellphones currently on the market.

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