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As being rapidly splashed across the internets, pricing for the Rogers iPhone have been revealed. There is some good news. It seems that the dictats of Steve have influenced global pricing on the iPhone as the Rogers plan closely matches that of AT&T.

The iPhone will cost you a data plan of $30 a month for “unlimited” (email, web) [ed - what about 3rd party apps?] or $45 a month for the enterprise email version. This is on top of a regular Rogers voice plan, system access fee etc. Basically this gibes with recent comments by Rogers President and COO Nadir Mohamed (and our own predictions) that the iPhone will cost the average customer about $90 a month. That’s not super cheap but it’s reasonable compared to the price of any blackberry plan.

As previously reported the iPhone will cost $199 up front (currency parity!) for the 8 GB version and $299 for the 16GB and extra color option(white). There’s also option for existing Rogers contract customers to upgrade to the iPhone. That’s the good news.

The bad news. Astonishingly, Rogers is only offering the phone on a 3-year contract. That’s 50% longer than AT&T (and anywhere else in the world) and twice as long as the 18 month contracts offered by O2 in the UK. For some reason, 3year contracts are legal in this country.

$199 + 36months x $90 = $3440 and that’s if you buy the cheap one. Don’t forget the GST/PST.

However, you’ll probably realize you are likely to spend at least that much on cellphone service in the next three years, no matter what your plan.

There’s no doubt the exclusive iPhone 3G is a coup for Rogers, and we can be sure they’ll be taking share from Bell and Telus not to mention locking-in a lot of Canadians just before more new competition arrives. Bell and Telus cannot offer the iPhone because their networks are not GSM. As far as we can tell the current iPhone 3G also does not support the AWS bands currently being auctioned in Canada. So the new entrants won’t get it either. That’s not to say though that future iPhone versions, and many other compelling handsets, won’t be hitting the AWS bands at least in the next 3 years.

There’s actually a whole bunch of really neat devices on a whole bunch of platforms already coming out in the next 3 to 9 months. But that’s a story for another post…

Chris Sorensen at The Star has the story that Rogers will be revamping their data pricing in time for the iPhone.

Mohamed said that wireless data pricing will “evolve” as Rogers subscribers begin using their phones for more than making voice calls – a trend expected to gain traction once Apple Inc.’s iPhone is made available to Canadians through Rogers on July 11….

“You will see more value in our pricing as we go forward,” Mohamed said today at a telecom conference in Toronto.

Rogers and other Canadian wireless operators have been criticized for charging subscribers some of the highest data rates in the developed world.

At WirelessNorth.ca we’re cautiously optimistic that Rogers is finally be at the cusp of embracing 21st century mobile trends. Rogers insiders have been whispering for a while that data pricing would be coming down when the time was right. Nonetheless we await to hear what exactly means “evolved” and “value”.

And then, in other news from “the more things change” department, the Star also reports that “While Rogers has yet to reveal how much it will cost Canadians to own an iPhone, executives have said they are not fans of unlimited plans such as those offered with the iPhone in the U.S. by AT&T Inc.”

We also know already that Rogers is also not a big fan of AT&T’s idea of “only” a 2-year contract either.

Great news the new 3G iPhone is live on Apple Canada online store. The catch? you can’t get one until (at least) July 11th and the device isn’t listed with any price. Seems like those slow production problem rumours were true. As of this moment, Rogers has yet to issue a press release with further details. Steve swears that the entry price will be no higher, anywhere on the planet, than 199US (that’s pretty cheap, nokia & blackberry look out). Paying no attention of course to what the obligatory contract will cost you over the length (cough) of the contract. The apple.ca store has also in recent times had some pretty curious ideas about how much 1 US dollar converts to in CAD these days. So 199USD could mean $209 or $219CAD

The biggest news with the new iPhone? it’s thinner, it’s faster, it’s (claimed) to have better battery life, it has pretty cool looking geolocation features … and … it’s all about killer 3rd party apps. Some pretty cool ones too.

Let us say this again: It’s all about killer 3rd party apps.

Is it finally time for Canadian carriers to wake up and smell the future?

UPDATE: More good news: Rogers and Apple Canada will be sticking to 199, 299 pricing. The bad: Why would they quible over entry price when the contract length is 3 long years (specific contract pricing is still unknown, however, guaranteed it will be $3,000+ over 3 years, and… iPhone 5.0 will be out by the time your contract is). The ugly: Availbility is still a big question mark. The apple site is suggesting you may have to buy the phone in-store. You may be in for nintendo wii-like shortages and chasing for stock around the city. Thanks to all wrote in with PR links!

It’s time to take out that second mortgage, the Rogers iPhone is finally landing. Coinciding with Apples World Wide Developers conference on June 9th, Steve Jobs will be announcing the launch of the next generation iPhone. As well as a host of other new countries, Rogers will be exclusively launching the phone Canada. Here’s a rumour roundup of everything Apple might announce on Monday. Hilariously the predictions are all over the map as to exactly what the phone will look like thicker, thinner, one new iphone or many etc.

Earlier on WirelessNorth.ca, here’s our predictions of what the Rogers iPhone: Rogers iPhone Predictions

Expect Rogers to make as much fuss about this launch. As the only (current) GSM provider, it’s a major coup for them and big opportunity to rope in as many more Canadians as they can to 3 year contracts before Canada’s new competing carriers are able to get a network up and running.

• It will be a 3G device on Rogers HSDPA network
• It will continue to have mediocre battery life (Though Jobs will make some claims to the contrary)
• The entry price will be $50 or $100 higher than whatever ATT&T or the Apple US store charges for the same model. Currency parity? The Apple store has never heard of it.
• It will come with a 3 year contract. Standard for Canada, but one year longer than any other jurisdiciton on the planet.
• It will come in June
• It will have a 1GB data cap
• Pricing packages including voice minutes, data, messaging & system access fee will start at a minimum of $80CAD a month before taxes (Rogers ARPU sits at nearly $75, no way they’ll let a flagship device bring down the mean)
• This means each iPhone will earn Rogers (cost you) about $3300 over the life of the contract. Yowza.
• With the speed of HSPA, web applications on the iPhone will get (more) awesome
• With no physical keyboard, addoption by enterprise and business users will still not really happen
• In the consumer segment, the device will give the Bold a run for it’s money (a device you shouldn’t expect to be cheap either)

As widely reported everywhere Ted has announced he finally got the iPhone. Rogers reports their Q1 earnings today, some notable points, ARPU (average revenue per user) is up almost $5 to a wallet crushing $72 thanks in part to a growth in Data ARPU (now 14% of revenues) and as Rogers seems to have lost some low end share to growing competition to the likes of Telus’ Koodo and other discount brands. (we hear koodo is doing well, despite the branding)

Meanwhile, further rumours have the Nokia N95 (and other n series?) coming to rogers as well. Certainly Rogers will price the hell out of the high-end Nokias but notice these two announcements would Rogers is finally (and smartly) dropping the hammer on their GSM advantage on Telus and Bell. Those two share a network based on the increasingly-orphaned CDMA standard not supported by nokia or apple.

The coming of May means an important tradition, the coming of the Spring quarter and new mobile pricing and marketing plans from all the big carriers. What shall it be this time?

Just off the phone with a CSR at Rogers for one who informed your editor of this little tidbit: the reason Roger’s roaming charges on data are so high (not unheard of for folks to run up 800-1000 blackberry bills on a few business trips to the US) is because Rogers has never had a roaming plan for data. There’s a thought. But, says the CSR as well as sources from other carriers, starting next week expect some new new rate plans across the board as each carrier launches their spring campaigns and Rogers clears the deck for iPhone.

Expect the iPhone in June or so. Expect it to be the second gen iPhone with 3G and a few other tweaks to the current model.

Thank goodness for decent blackberry plans on Telus and new GSM entrants on the horizon, elsewise your future is looking awfully Rogery and you might as well sign over all your future paychecks to Ted right now just to get it over with.

Rogers has announced they will be launching LG’s fullscreen touch device the “VU”. Does this mean the iPhone doesn’t cometh if Rogers is launching this otherother white meat of touch-screen phone? The Vu is basically a North American version of last year’s “Prada” model phone in Europe. I guess the fashion branding would be lost on us un-sophisticates across the pond. The Prada phone was basically LG’s hasty iFauxne response to apple’s announcement of their device. At some point, we’ll see something like this from nokia too.

It aint’ no iPhone, but the device does have a few extra tricks up it’s sleeve including full HTML browser, fast HSDPA radio, and SD card support, and mobile TV features. Does this mean we can forget about the iPhone on Rogers?

Not necessarily. AT&T the only other North American carrier with the VU also has the iPhone.

Heri asks: “if you had to choose between developing for the iPhone or choosing android, which one would you pick?”

The choice is easy for now, there’s lots of iPhones out there, not so many androids. Build iPhone apps. Get your app out there, learn and iterate. Build an Android version when there actually androids out there to run it.

Android could be big news, I breathlessly await a flood of cheap highly capable off-brand Chinese or Taiwan made Androids to come rolling in across the pacific. (who would need to buy a subsidized phone and 3year contract anymore?) But even in the optimistic scenario, I see Android as a 2009 story at the earliest. Not till then will we a significant number in the field, and not till then will we really know what the killer features and form-factors will end up being or if Android is a hit at all.

I don’t think the form factor you see in the emulator will be it. It’s a bit fugly.

If you are a developer, I’d say learn the iPhone first. You’ll find more work, and more immediately rewarding work, in the near term building for the platform with the larger installed base.

Anyone care to disagree?

Apple and RIM . Like Jr high sweethearts dancing a full arm’s lengths apart, but intent on trampling each other’s toes anyway, Apple announced today two kindof big things:

1. The iPhone is getting a mess of new enterprise features. Despite the hype though, remember that none of these software updates will help your iPhone magically sprout a Querty keyboard (One point still for the kids from Waterloo).
2. The apple software SDK

the crucial bit:

-The AppStore is going to be the exclusive way to distribute iPhone applications
-Your app will be updated over the air automatically
-If an app gets updated, the AppStore will “otomatically” tell you it has been updated
-Also built into iPhones, you can download it on your computer and transfer it too if you want, but we think most people will do it from the iPhone
-Just tap on it and it’s wirelessly downloaded to the iPhone using a cell network or WiFi
-Top 50, top downloads
-Categories for games, business, finance, health, lifestyle, music, etc.
-AppStore, put it on every single iPhone that everyone will have access to with the next release of the software
-Jobs: “Your dream is to get your app in front of every iPhone user. You can’t do that today, but we’re gonna solve that”
-Scott is back. “Once you have all of these amazing applications, how do you get them on your phone?” Back to Steve Jobs.

This is significant because:

• By pushing software SDK updates to phone (post sale), Apple is effectively reinventing it’s mobile platform (It’s truly a platform not just a device) with every new release
• The total package of the iPhone looks a lot different than it did just a year ago, but running on the exact same hardware.
• This is hugely disintermediating to the carriers as substantial and potentially valuable new services and content is being pushed directly to the consumer without their involvement, buy-in or pre-loaded bundling agreement.
• The carrier has been made a dumb pipe.
• Apple is charging 30%(!) of revenues to content providers
• 30% leaves a lot of incentive for mobile content/app/service vendors to seek out other ways monetize their content. But you might imagine that being on the apple deck of the apple mobile ap store could be a powerful distribution channel.
• Everything will also be available on the wifi iPod touch – which further bends the definition of mobile, and even more so cuts out the carriers.
• Note that iphone store will be “exclusive” distribution channel but that jailbroken phone users will still have other options (as many iphone users already install 3rd party apps today without apples permission)
• Spore runs on it. That’s neat.

The Apple iPhone is not yet officially available in Canada.

This announcement adds more weight to “post-June” as the likely date.

Most Canadians already know what an iPhone is. A surprising number use one already.

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.