Wirelessnorth.ca

The rumour is that 10s of thousands of iPhones are circulating on Rogers network already. So many that it’s one of their more popular single handsets and effectively considered an unofficial SKU by their tech and customer support.

When will the iPhone come to Canada for real though? Apple’s COO, Timothy Cook has stated that expanding to more countries is in the works and best thing they can do, ironically enough, to combat rampant unlocking.

You have to remember that the iPhone, lovely as it is, just barely made it to market at launch. And in the last year Apple has been rapidly backfilling with features, tweaks (and SDKs) that you might have expected to be there originally. Though they seem to have quite the panache for it, Apple is still very, very new to the wireless game and trying to drive hard bargains with the world’s fractious and multitudinous collection of carriers is complicated business.

Meanwhile EDGE is rapidly loosing it’s luster and whereas 3G may once have been too battery hungry to effectively cram into that svelte iLozenge, technology marches on. I’ve always said that the best way to predict Apple’s product cycles is just to look at the chips. Though they may be shinier on the outside, Apple hardware, like everyone else’s, have identically humble innards. There are only a few foundries that supply everyone’s chips, and these folks tend to be (relatively at least) forthcoming about their roadmaps.

So why rollout the iPhone to a whole mess of new countries on the eve of iPhone Mark II? Better strategically to wait and spring the upgraded model on them and all the better to have all those cursed unlocked punters boil with jealousy so they buy in to a contract to get the new one anyway.

This theory is supported by a research note out of UBS today that “German chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG (IFX) likely will be supplying the new systems solution to Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) next-generation iPhone… and that 3G-enabled iPhones will be released by mid-year, and that the current EDGE iPhone platform is being ramped down earlier than expected to “clean” inventories.”

My prediction then, sometime around this summer, expect Jobs to finally start taking Ted Roger’s phone calls.

The bad news being, you may have to wait a little longer for your (official) iPhone. The good news being, an official iPhone could be a great thing. One, you won’t have to worry about bricking it with every update AND, second, is the service plan. While I don’t promise it will come cheap, Jobs has thus far demanded that every carrier offer something singularly and spectacularly unheard of in Canada – a flat rate data plan.

A 3G iPhone without flat rate data is like a snorkeling holiday in the Sahara.