Here’s some love for Canadian mobile users, all the way from Norway!

Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera Software (that’s him to the left) recently posted his company’s State of the Mobile Web for 2008. The report contains stats for specific countries, and because Canada is included I thought it worthy of re-posting here.

Thanks to the intrepid team at IntoMobile.com for bringing this to my attention…

Snapshot: Canada

• Page-view growth since January 2008: 187.4%
• Facebook is popular among Opera Mini users in Canada. (well, duh…)
• Opera Mini users in Canada prefer Google, with Live in a distant second place, and Yahoo completely absent from the top ten list.

Top sites ranked by unique users

1. google.com
2. facebook.com
3. cnn.com (no CBC.ca? For shame…)
4. wikipedia.org
5. gamejump.com
6. youtube.com
7. my.opera.com
8. live.com
9. hotmail.com
10. nytimes.com (why not TheStar.com instead?)

Top handsets for November 2008

1. BlackBerry 8330
2. BlackBerry 8130
3. BlackBerry 9000 (AKA the BB Bold, which has Opera Mini installed by default)
4. BlackBerry 8310
5. Nokia N95
6. BlackBerry 8320
7. Nokia E71 (w00t w00t!)
8. Sony Ericsson K850i
9. Nokia 6275i
10. Sony Ericsson W810i

Even though I myself have moved on from Canada’s smartphone success story it’s not surprising that RIM devices occupy no less than half of the top ten handsets browsing the mobile web in this country. As for the rest of the world I was especially heartened to read this:

Experts predicted this year as the year when the mobile Web would become mainstream. Our numbers from previous reports on Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia have confirmed that indeed the mobile phone has come into its own as a platform for the Web.

If you don’t have Opera Mini already installed on your handset click here to read my glowing review, then hurry up and download it already — unless you have an iPhone, in which case I can’t help you…

I still remember the first time I saw a Fido handset. It was some kind of Ericsson, pre-dating the T18z but with a similar design, with an integrated belt clip built into the hardware. Like most Ericsson handsets of the day it was very European and classy, but then Sony bought out their handset business. And while market share increased, that elusive cachet was largely gone.

It’s the same story with Fido; back in the days when Rogers was still a TDMA network, Fido was GSM all the way, and carried the first dual-band handsets that could be used in Europe and parts of Asia.

But then our government inexplicably allowed Rogers to buy a controlling stake in Fido, effectively creating a monopoly on GSM service in this country. For the past few years Fido has languished, with Rogers getting most of the premium handsets for their own portfolio and tossing a bone or two Fido’s way.

As of today Fido has a new logo, and there can be no mistake about its place in the Rogers empire — as Koodo is to Telus and Solo is to Bell, Fido has officially been re-branded as the poor cousin to the “premium” Rogers Wireless.

But it’s not all bad news: To effectively compete in the bottom end of the market Fido has done away with the roundly-criticized System Access Fee, and while their handset lineup will continue to be, well… craptacular, the killer feature of the removable SIM chip — enabling the use of unlocked phones — remains intact.

Though I’m clearly a mobile elitist I’ll be staying loyal to Fido for the foreseeable future — I’m locked in to a pretty damn awesome calling plan and a best-that-can-be-expected-for-Canada deal on data. Still, it does suck that Fido isn’t cool anymore…

What I’ll miss:

• The exclusive handsets, especially my hiptop;
• The European-flavoured ads, courtesy of Fido’s Montreal-based agency;
• Being the envy of fellow Canadian travellers to Europe and Asia.

And not so much:

• The System Access Fee, obviously;
• The small, largely urban calling area before Rogers took over.

What I’ll most remember:

• Driving home from the family cottage and re-acquiring a digital signal just north of Orangeville, Ontario — letting me know I was back in civilization.

On this, the morning of the televised leaders’ debate (the Canadian one, because I live in Canada) I present to you three viral videos I directed for the anti-Stephen Harper site AnyoneButHarper.ca — parodies of ads you may have seen on TV or on the Conservative Party web portal:

Harper on Veterans.

Harper on Family.

Harper on The Arts.

Feel free to spread these far and wide, and on October 14th vote to elect anyone but Harper!

So CBC’s Search Engine Podcast is back with a vengeance; Episode 2 of the new series is all about the very foundation of the World Wide Web — linking.

You’d think by now, some 15 years after the first web browser was made available for desktop computers, that old media would have figured out how to increase the value of their content by linking to external sites — but sadly, bewilderingly, this is not the case.

As proof may I present to you the YouTube video embedded above, Québec superstar Michel Rivard’s scathing commentary on the sad state of the arts in Canada.

The video is mentioned on at least two old media news sites, The Toronto Star (click on the embedded Canadian Press video) and The Saskatoon Star Phoenix — yet neither of them provides a link to the actual YouTube page.

Granted, TheStar.com is how I found out about the video in the first place, but it is incomprehensible to me that in this day and age a reader should have to leave either of the two sites mentioned above to find the YouTube video on their own.

Jesse Brown talks about old media’s reluctance to cite sources in the latest Search Engine Podcast. Again, that link to it is here. See how easy that was?

As the Rogers/Fido iPhone debacle continues there’s some new bad news for mobile users in this country: Bell Canada and Telus Mobility have both announced their intention to charge customers for incoming text messages as of next month.

For anyone not schooled in the etiquette of mobile carriers, this is how it has worked in the rest of the world for the last, oh, decade or so: Subscribers pay for outgoing calls and texts only; to be asked to pay for the receipt of such things would be tantamount to a slap in the face.

And who is the only politician in this country with the power to stop this? God help us all, it’s none other than Hollywood shill Jim Prentice, our Honourable Minister of Doing It Wrong…

Now to be fair Prentice has called upon representatives from both companies to meet with him about this issue, but presumably it’s to find out whether they want him to swallow or not.

NDP leader Jack Layton is taking up the cause with an online petition, but it seems to me that if you sit across the floor from the guy in The House of Commons you should maybe be able to to better than that. Still, it’s better than nothing.

I really hope Ottawa can get with the program on this stuff, if not for Canadians then at least for the international visitors who will hopefully still be visiting for The Winter Olympics in 2010…

I had the opportunity this year to spend Canada’s National Holiday in Ottawa, Ontario, our nation’s capital city. And since I didn’t want to burden myself with a heavy laptop I instead packed only my brand-new Nokia E90 — graciously on loan from Nokia’s WOM World — for the two-day trip.

The night before my departure I transferred my PIM data over to the E90 via the appropriate iSync plug-in from Nokia. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Nokia has done everything right here for Mac users; in fact, because I can also sync up to-do lists along with my address book and calendar events I would go so far to say that S60 handsets are actually more compatible with the Mac than Apple’s own mobile device!

Once on the road I had almost five hours to check email, text friends and surf the web with Opera Mini. The direct morning sun had absolutely no adverse effect on the E90’s wide and perfectly readable interior screen. When closed the handset doesn’t actually seem so big, but when open I found it quite a stretch to move my fingers over the wide keyboard with any kind of speed. Though the keys are generously large and have a nice feel, I think shaving half an inch or so off either end of the handset would go a long way towards making it more usable. Shall I go ahead and do this for you, WOM World?

Upon my arrival I quickly set up the E90 to access the available WiFi network where I was staying. My host also graciously offered a guest laptop as a tempting alternative, and I actually ended up using it for about half the time I was there. For basic web consumption the E90 with Opera Mini is perfectly fine, but I share a lot of links via Digg, Reddit and the like and could really use a mobile browser that supports bookmarklets.

On the morning of July 1st we made our way to Meech Lake for a scenic drive and hike. The E90 was safely ensconced in my sidebag and despite its heft, didn’t weigh me down any more than my other camera I had packed with it. You can see a video sample of a babbling brook here — note that YouTube has almost certainly upscaled it past it’s original 320 x 240 pixel resolution.

Later that afternoon it was back to The Hill to join the crowds for the big show. It was here that another E90 issue became apparent: Though the built-in 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera soundly trumps the fixed-focus imager on my E61i, the software and/or camera button borders on unusable.

Take this souvenir photo of a famous Canadian guilty pleasure, for example. By the time I was able to snap this blurry pic the freshly deep-fried dough wasn’t even hot anymore — first I mistakenly captured a video instead of a still image, and then I stood there like an idiot in the middle of the street waiting with my E90 pointed squarely at my dessert, waiting for some sign of confirmation that the photo of this thing had actually been taken.

Part of the problem is the camera button itself. First off, pressing it does NOT open up the camera app like it does on Nokia’s N95. and unlike the big alphanumeric keys on the inside of the handset that go clickety-click, this important part of the machine/human interface has a lot of give but zero tactile feedback! It’s as if some Nokia engineer walked in gravel on his way into the E90 design lab, picked a piece of it off of the sole of his shoe and said: “Hey, this would make an all right camera button…”

Another annoyance occurs if the phone happens to ring while the handset is open. My instinct would be to close the clamshell so I could take the call like I would on a regular phone, but closing up the unit immediately terminates the connection, so you’re forced to leave it open and make the caller suffer through a typically tinny speakerphone exchange.

But here’s a testament to the E90’s unabashed business prowess: Over the fifty-four or so hours I spent away from home I was able to secure a television interview with a local news station about Canada’s GSM monopoly through a combination of phone calls, emails, texts and map searches — all performed without so much as a shrug by this super-powered device!

So I have this friend who’s in the market for a new mobile phone. Like me, she’s on the Fido GSM network here in Toronto and also like me she’s come to appreciate the value of a QWERTY keypad, like the one I currently enjoy on my Nokia E61i. Unlike me she’s on a limited budget and uses a Windows computer, but as luck would have it I’ve an old HTC TyTN sitting in my drawer — so all we’d have to do to get her up and running on the mobile internet is to fix her up with a data plan on Fido. And that’s where it all goes to hell.

It’s such a long, convoluted story that I hardly know where to begin, but the sad fact is that, on the GSM side of things anyway, the cost of mobile data here is nothing short of an international embarrassment.

A mere two years ago I was surfing and emailing to my heart’s content with a Fido hiptop — our version of the T-Mobile Sidekick. Everyone I showed my hiptop to was instantly jealous of it, and a funny thing about having unlimited access to the internet wherever I went… It became incredibly useful.

And then the unthinkable happened. Rogers, another big Canadian company here and the country’s only other GSM carrier was inexplicably given the green light by our government to gobble up Fido and create an instant GSM monopoly in this country. And the first casualty was the new and improved hiptop3, rumoured to be in final network compatibility testing by Fido staff before Rogers instantly put the kibosh on it.

In its place Fido customers now have the following options available for mobile data:

• $60 per month for 25 MB, with $6 per additional MB.
• $100 per month for 200 MB, with $5 per additional MB.

And in case you were wondering, both of these “plans” are quite a bit more expensive than my much faster cable internet connection at home, also from Rogers.

To be fair, there are some breaks — you can surf all you want on a locked handset’s crappy microbrowser for a mere $7 per month, just don’t try to install something actually useful like Opera Mini or you’ll be charged the full rate of 5¢ per kilobyte, Yup, you heard me… Kilobyte. Apparently the way they police this is by capturing the handset’s serial number or IMEI during transmission, so presumably it has more to do with Fido and Rogers pushing multi-year contracts on their customers through subsidized phones than anything going above beyond a barely adequate customer experience.

There are also slightly more reasonable email-only plans for locked Windows Mobile handsets, but nothing like the unlimited, uncapped data I enjoyed on my hiptop.

That is until now.

For me, the iPhone’s killer feature is making the mobile internet palatable for the public at large. I can’t for the life of me see it being released here without unlimited bandwidth on-board, as (1) it’s primarily an internet device, and (2) Apple wants every iPhone owner to sign up for its MobileMeh service.

In a previous post I wrote that I would purchase an iPhone with unlimited data on principle alone. The one caveat would be Rogers requiring a 3-year commitment (the current industry standard in Canada) to enjoy unfettered internet access. I’m going to have to ruminate on that one for a bit — you may have heard that I’m not exactly a fan of carrier contracts…

Rogers and Fido aside, learning to live with iPhone’s shortcomings — the virtual keyboard, and lack of video and office support — will be a relatively small price to pay for having the whole internet in my pocket.

Perhaps too, in time, other wireless customers here will demand that their handsets have uncapped data access as well, but baby steps… Canada needs the iPhone to bring us out of the mobile data dark ages before any kind of renaissance can begin.

I’ve been a smartphone user since 2002. In that time I’ve used BlackBerries, TyTNs and almost everything in between. I’ve also been a Mac user since 1986, so you’d think that Apple’s iPhone would be a perfect fit for me.

Not so. While flicking, pinching and spreading your fingers on it is certainly impressive, in my mind the iPhone won’t be a true smartphone until native 3rd-party applications become available through official channels on version 2 of the device — and that’s all but guaranteed to be announced at this year’s WWDC.

For the past year I’ve been a very happy user of a Nokia handset running S60. It doesn’t have the email ease of a your typical BlackBerry but it packs all the power of a Windows Mobile device with a surprisingly Mac-like look and feel. So what would it take for this new iPhone to win over a smartphone power user like yours truly? I’m glad you asked..

Unlimited, Uncapped Data

Granted, this isn’t so much about the iPhone itself but rather a test of Apple’s marketing muscle. Word has it that Rogers Wireless, the GSM monopoly in Canada thanks to their acquisition of my carrier Fido (and a generally clueless CRTC), will announce availability of the new iPhone here alongside Apple’s WWDC launch.

Also rumoured is a 1GB cap on mobile data. Currently, 1 GB/month is the most data you can currently buy on either Rogers or Fido, and at $65 is even more expensive than my $54.95/month cable internet connection at home. That connection is also capped, but with no extra charge for the first 95 GB I’m only paying $1.50/GB — and it’s not like I’m downloading BitTorrents on my smartphone, at least not yet…

If Apple can strong-arm Rogers into offering a truly unlimited mobile data experience on their new handset I would probably buy one on principal alone.

Video Capture

With high end feature phones now sporting 5 megapixel autofocus cameras the very least Apple can do is offer video recording on their new device. And they probably will.

A Better QWERTY

Countless people have sung to me the praises of the iPhone’s predictive on-screen keypad. I’m sure that coming from your standard numberpad the iPhone’s virtual QWERTY is quite an improvement. But yours truly has been spoiled by the best QWERTY keypads in the business, and every time someone lets me play with their iPhone or iPod touch I come away with the same conclusion — that Apple’s keypad is crap.

It could definitely be made better with real keys, perhaps on a slide-out board like the HTC TyTN. Or at the very least keys themselves could be made larger. But something clearly has to be done; there’s little if any learning curve to typing on a BlackBerry — why should the iPhone be any different?

SMS Archiving

Since giving up my BlackBerry I’ve come to appreciate the value of text messaging over push email, and wrote about it in a previous post. One of the first apps I would need to see on the iPhone store is something that can back up texts on the iPhone to my Mac, preferably in an open document format.

iWork On-Board

I’ve been editing Office docs on the go since I got my first-gen colour Treo in 2002. There’s no excuse for Apple not building some kind of Office functionality into the new iPhone — and if they wanted to be all sneaky about it they could make it compatible only with their own iWork suite. As a recent iWork convert, I wouldn’t complain.

Mac-friendly Solution to MS Exchange

Yet another of the many rumours floating around is a revamp of Apple’s .Mac service into an online PIM. I actually wrote about this idea when the first iPhone was announced over a year and a half ago, and I maintain that this would be the killer app for Apple’s nascent smartphone — at least for anyone syncing it to a Mac.

I’ve studied many options for online PIMs and my two Macs, and none of them even comes close to the utility of the Fido hiptop (or T-Mobile Sidekick) web portal. Apple has indicated upcoming support for Microsoft Exchange, but the two problems with Exchange are (1) it’s hideous, and (2) it only really works with Internet Explorer for Windows.

If Apple can provide a solution where my contacts, calendars and to-dos are synchronized instantaneously over the air between iPhone and multiple Macs for no additional cost — or at least something more reasonable than $15+ CAD/month they’re currently charging for multiple users — then they just might have another iPhone customer.

… Provided that the new iPhone also meets the previous five criteria, of course. My current Nokia can’t do much about the cost of Canadian mobile data, but it trumps iPhone 1.0 in every other respect. Still, I’ll be paying very close attention to news from the WWDC tomorrow, just like you…

In preparation for my annual trip to Bermuda and its Film Festival I thought I’d go paperless with Air Canada’s new Mobile Check-in service. And predictably, instead of ending up with a 2D barcode I got the message seen in the screen grab above.

Just so I’m clear on this… I have a phone running the number one smartphone OS in the world, made by the world’s number one handset manufacturer, and yet it’s not recognized by Air Canada.

My bad, clearly…

Talk about bad timing… Last Friday morning I fired off an email to one of the show’s producers pitching myself as a guest — little did I know that The Lab with Leo had already been cancelled.

As lame as it sounds, The Lab and its predecessor Call for Help have been my dinner date most nights for the past couple of years. And despite the usual suspects phoning in because they can’t check their email or their pirated copy of Windows won’t boot on a ten year-old computer, the show is — sorry, was — actually quite informative. It taught this n00b everything he needed to know about Windows before diving into XP and the WinMo (and subsequently deciding that he liked his Macs better).

The roster of regular in-house guests was impressive, from security expert Steve Gibson to digital photography guru Ray Maxwell. In fact, the only element missing from the show was a dedicated segment on mobile phones. Given that I screen-tested for another Techtv show a few years back I thought I might at least have a chance but alas, it’s too late. Now I’m stuck watching reruns of The Simpsons or, god forbid, the xenophobic fear-mongering that the six o’clock news has become…

What I’ll miss:

1. Everything I ever needed to know about Windows.
2. Similarly useful info about Macs as well.

And not so much:

1. Stupid callers. Lots of them.
2. Fat guys and golf shirts as far as the eye could see. Whether intended or not, every single episode sent a strong subliminal message to its viewers to step away from their computers and go shopping or to the gym.