Pt 1: iPhone and Technolust - Rogers announced that it would officially launch the long-awaited iPhone in Canada on Friday, July 11, 2008. That meant legions of die-hard Apple fans would sop up a year's worth of anticipatory drool and begin queuing to get their hands on one of the most talked about gizmos ever. At least that's what Rogers was hoping would happen. But not all went according to plan.

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Pt 2: Letters - Summer host Jim Brown was joined in studio by Lara O'Brien, a producer with The Current, to look at some listener mail.

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Today's guest host was Jim Brown.


Satire

It's Thursday, July 10th.

Industry Minister Jim Prentice has written letters to Bell Mobility and Telus Mobility, asking them to explain their decision to start charging their customers for every text message they receive.

Currently, Bell and Telus have detailed their responses ... in 181,274 text messages.

This is The Current.

iPhone and Technolust

Rogers announced that it would officially launch the long-awaited iPhone in Canada on Friday, July 11, 2008. That meant legions of die-hard Apple fans would sop up a year's worth of anticipatory drool and begin queuing to get their hands on one of the most talked about gizmos ever. At least that's what Rogers was hoping would happen. But not all went according to plan.

Jamie Lynch's company, oilchange.com, hosted an online petition signed by close to 60,000 Canadians protesting the rate plans Rogers has set for the iPhone. You see, Rogers is the only company in Canada with the capacity to run the iPhone. And when the company first announced what it was going to charge to do that, Canadian consumers went a little nuts. Many argued that any way you dial it, a three-year contract with Rogers is one of the most expensive iPhone plans on the planet.

Big data plans are very important to would-be iPhone users because it's a gadget built for web-surfing and emailing, not just making phone calls. On July 9, 2008, Rogers introduced a new data plan, at a reduced rate, but only for anyone who bought an iPhone before the end of August 2008. So we asked Rogers Wireless spokeswoman Liz Hamilton if the company was caught off guard by the outcry.

Some were wondering if any of this would actually put a dent in iPhone sales, or whether our collective techno-lust just cannot be denied. But in 2007, as many as 100,000 Canadians bought iPhones from the United States, "unlocked" the software that prevents them from working here, and hooked them up to the Rogers network on their own. And if you talk to some of those people, it's like they're in love.

We played a romantic dispatch to a year-old iPhone by our friend Dan Misener, a producer at CBC Radio's technology and trends show, Spark.

But the thing about torrid, all-consuming love affairs is that they can cloud your judgment -- and they don't always last. For their thoughts on why slick gadgets make technophiles go weak in the knees and how some companies seem to be able to engineer techno-lust, we were joined from Charlottetown by Amber Mac, a technology journalist and blogger, and from San Francisco by Paul Wiefels, Managing Director of The Chasm Group, a technology strategy consulting firm and a former Apple employee.


Music

Agustin Barrios: Una Limosna Por Amor De Dios


Listen to Part One:

 

Letters and Documentary

Summer host Jim Brown was joined in studio by Lara O'Brien, a producer with The Current, to look at some listener mail.


A Long History (Documentary)

Back in the 1930s, the United States government sanctioned a mass deportation, pushing a still unknown number of people out of the U.S. and into Mexico. But as far as most history books are concerned, those people simply disappeared and the event never happened. But that may change. By 2007, a small but dedicated group of people were trying to shed some light on this relatively unknown chapter in U.S. history. The Current's Joan Webber went to meet one of them and prepared this documentary. It's called "A Lost History" and it first aired on The Current in November 2007.



Listen to Part Two: