Certainly seems like Canadian carriers are a good deal more friendly toward launching European handsets than American carriers are, doesn’t it? Motorola’s Milestone and HTC’s Desire Z are both prime examples — and now it looks like another hot HTC, the Desire HD, is on its way. MobileSyrup appears to have scored a shot of a Desire HD running Telus firmware, claiming that it’s currently tracking for release in either January or February — presumably with most or all of the specs that grace its European cousin: 4.3-inch WVGA display, HTCSense.com integration, a 1GHz second-generation Qualcomm Snapdragon core, and 8 megapixel camera, just to name a few luscious spec line items. Unfortunately, the skeptic in us doesn’t think January / February gives either HTC or Telus enough time to turn out a skinner Gingerbread firmware here — but considering what a minor release Gingerbread really is, we’re sure plenty of buyers will be able to overlook the indiscretion (particularly with a little help from xda-developers, if you catch our drift).
We have no idea why Samsung’s having such a hard time delivering its overdue promised Froyo upgrades worldwide for the Galaxy S series, but it’s not looking any easier for them this weekend: the only Canadian Galaxy S to get upgraded so far, Bell’s Vibrant, has just had its update pulled. Seems a healthy number of users attempting the upgrade using Sammy’s Kies desktop software ended up with inaccessible internal storage, which sucks for a variety of obvious reasons — and that would be the apparent reason for the removal of the update. Here’s the official statement:
“There have been intermittent issues reported during the firmware upgrade process with Kies for the Samsung Galaxy S i9000M series of phones. Samsung’s development team is currently aware of this issue and working towards a solution. Accordingly, The firmware update feature, which affects the ability to upgrade to Android 2.2, is temporarily disabled until a solution is released. We apologize for the inconvenience.”
Bringing this up with your local AT&T rep is liable to get you laughed out of the store, but things are a little different up in Canada where one of the major carriers is now offering an unlock service — for a fee. If you’re on Rogers (or its budget subsidiary, Fido) and you’re a customer in good standing with an iPhone that you’ve previously purchased from them and you’re not currently in a contract, you can pay $50 Canadian — that’s $50 US, for those of you not up to speed on current conversion rates — to have Rogers’ customer service reps flip a switch that’ll cause the phone to magically unlock the next time you restore it while connected to iTunes. Considering the restrictions, they should probably be offering the service for free, but it’s a start.
Buy this phone, won’t you please buy this phone? We’ve no idea why Telus has to try so hard to convince Canadian buyers to grab themselves a Windows Phone 7 handset, but the carrier’s expected to sweeten the deal dramatically over the next few days by bundling a freebie Xbox 360 with every WP7 device activation or renewal. The offer starts today, according to this leaked memo, and will last through to the end of the week, December 19th. Telus carries the HTC 7 Surround and LG Optimus 7, neither of which would seem to have caught fire quite the way Microsoft would have wanted. Ah well, if you’re going to sell your wireless soul for a whole three years, you might as well do it for a phone-plus-console combo.
Those promised December Froyo updates for Canada’s Galaxy S models? Yeah, they’ve started hitting — or at least one of them has. Owners of Bell’s Vibrant are the first to get hooked up, though you’ll need to use Sammy’s Kies desktop software to facilitate the setup — they’re not doing over-the-air updates for some reason we won’t even pretend to understand. Interestingly, the support page for the update process says that both Rogers’ Captivate and Telus’ Fascinate are having their updates tested as we speak and that they are “working on a release for later in December 2010,” which goes against an earlier statement that the Fascinate wouldn’t get 2.2 until “early 2011.” But hey, if they beat that estimate, who are we to complain?
Canadian upstart carrier Mobilicity is doing what the little guys often do best — undercutting its bigger rivals — and it’s doing that in an especially dramatic way this holiday season with a pair of pretty enticing new plans. The “exclusive holiday offers” include CAD $30 and $40 price levels ($30 to $40 US, coincidentally) that include unlimited calling and messaging, while the $40 option throws in unlimited US long distance, global text messaging, and unlimited data. That’s not quite as spectacular now that the Canadian and American dollars are at parity — but even so, it’s definitely on the very highest rungs of the value spectrum. Interested? The plans are available through December 24th.
Samsung’s probably wishing it could just forget its claim that it’d have Froyo rolled out to all carriers last month, but at least it’s providing a little bit of updated guidance to its Canadian users. Turns out Bell’s Vibrant and Rogers’ Captivate are on track for the middle of this month, while owners of Telus’ Fascinate will need to wait a little longer: “early 2011,” to be exact, which really isn’t exact at all since it could easily mean anywhere between January and, say, April or so. Of course, Gingerbread will be all over the place by then — and we might even be seeing our first glimpses of Honeycomb — so be prepared for your version envy to continue unabated.
Samsung’s probably wishing it could just forget its claim that it’d have Froyo rolled out to all carriers last month, but at least it’s providing a little bit of updated guidance to its Canadian users. Turns out Bell’s Vibrant and Rogers’ Captivate are on track for the middle of this month, while owners of Telus’ Fascinate will need to wait a little longer: “early 2011,” to be exact, which really isn’t exact at all since it could easily mean anywhere between January and, say, April or so. Of course, Gingerbread will be all over the place by then — and we might even be seeing our first glimpses of Honeycomb — so be prepared for your version envy to continue unabated.
With the precedent the Galaxy Tab has set, it was an open question whether carriers would embrace the WiFi version of RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook — after all, it’s a little harder to fully monetize a data plan on a device that lacks its own cellular modem. Thing is, the WiFi version is the first one that’s going to be available; RIM hasn’t given much guidance yet on when the cellular version will follow on — and RIM doesn’t have much of a distribution channel outside its carrier partners. Well, Rogers has thrown its hat in the ring today at its TabLife event in Toronto, where it has been chatting up the success of the tablets it’s sold so far (the Tabs apparently won’t stay on shelves) and noting that it will be carrying both versions of the PlayBook as they become available.
How’s that going to work from a data perspective? Well, a concurrent announcement out of Rogers seems to hold the answer. A pair of new so-called “data sharing plans” can be tacked onto your existing smartphone plan, effectively opening up your data bucket to other devices — so it’s basically like the tethering plans we’ve started to see sprout up on American networks under a different name. One oddity, though, is the CAD $20 (roughly $20) data sharing plan that allows unlimited social networking on “popular sites” above and beyond your normal bucket of gigabytes — sounds silly, but when we think about what percentage of our mobile time is spent on Twitter and Facebook, it might just be crazy enough to work. Follow the break for Rogers’ press release and a quick clip of Rogers exec John Boynton with the PlayBook mention.
Canada’s Bell appears to be taking advantage of Netgear’s partnership with Ericsson on this one, putting its 21Mbps HSPA+ network to good use. Not to say that phones aren’t a great use for high-speed data, of course, but that’s enough bandwidth to realistically replace a home internet connection or two — and that’s exactly what the so-called MBR 1210 Turbo Hub sets out to do, spreading an incoming Bell data signal over up to 15 devices connected via WiFi and Ethernet. Interestingly, it also allows users to use the HSPA+ hookup as an automatic fallback in case your primary connection (say, DSL or cable) fails — perfect for us “blog or die” types. You’ll pay CAD $149.95 (about $147) on a two-year deal to put a Turbo Hub on your shelf, or CAD $299.95 ($294) sans contract; plans, meanwhile, range from CAD $35 to $60 ($34 to $59) for between 3GB and 10GB of data (no metric / English conversion necessary there) with a $10 surcharge to gain access to the 21Mbps signal — you get 7.2Mbps otherwise. It’s a pretty creative plan structure, and we’re sure folks would appreciate an unlimited option… preferably without any extra speed fees. Follow the break for the full press release.
