All Things Digital

Canada’s long national nightmare has ended. The iPhone’s coming to the Great White North. Apple (AAPL) and Canadian wireless provider Rogers Communications (RCI) have finalized a deal that will soon bring the iPhone to the RIM BlackBerry’s backyard.

“We’re thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year,” Rogers chief executive Ted Rogers said in a statement just full of details. “We can’t tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.”

Good news for Rogers, which had suggested prior to the iPhone’s launch it would offer the phone in Canada, but was later forced to admit it hadn’t yet inked a deal with Apple.

Good news, too, for Canadian cellphone users. Particularly if Apple was able to wring a substantial reduction in wireless plan charges from Rogers–which, like all Canadian carriers, is notorious for its exorbitantly priced data rates. In the U.S., AT&T’s (T) combined iPhone service and data plans start at $59.99 for 450 anytime minutes, 5,000 additional night and weekend minutes, and unlimited data. A comparable plan from Rogers Wireless runs about $295 per month. And while the company recently began offering an “Unlimited On-Device Mobile Browsing Plan,” it doesn’t apply to BlackBerries, Windows Mobile devices or other smart-phones.

EBay (EBAY) may yet find a way to justify the astonishing $2.6 billion it paid for Skype. This morning, the Internet phone service launched an aggressive new international calling plan. For flat fees of up to $9.95-a-month, Skype is offering unlimited calls to computers, landlines and some cellphones in 34 countries.

“For example if you live in London, for just 2.95 euros a month, you can call your grandmother in Poland, whenever you like, talk for up to six hours at a time, and not worry about how much it’s costing you,” explained Stefan Oberg, VP and GM of telecoms at Skype. “Your grandmother doesn’t need to understand the Internet. You just use your Skype subscription to make the call and she just picks up the phone.”

An interesting move, and one that comes just days after incoming eBay CEO John Donahoe said the company will consider selling Skype at the end of the year if it can’t find ways to use it to support its core business. “What we’re testing this year are the synergies,” Donahoe told the Financial Times. “If the synergies are strong, we’ll keep it in our portfolio. If not, we’ll reassess it.”

While consensus has long held that the synergies to which Donahoe refers are anything but strong, that may be changing. Last week eBay reported earnings, noting that Skype added 33 million subscribers in the first quarter of this year, boosting its total membership to 309 million. Revenue also hit $126 million, up 61% from the same quarter last year.

Well, it’s about time. With 48 billion text messages sent every month in the United States and one of every eight American households using only mobile phones for communications, it’s finally occurred to the federal government that a nationwide cellphone alert system might be a good idea.

And so yesterday the Federal Communications Commission announced plans to develop an emergency-alert system that would broadcast SMS messages to cellphones and other mobile devices wherever a crisis occurs. The Commercial Mobile Alert System, as it’s been dubbed, will deliver three different types of text alerts to mobile phone subscribers: presidential alerts concerning terrorist attacks and whatnot; imminent threat alerts warning of natural disasters; and Amber Alert child abduction warnings.

Sounds like a nice comprehensive program. Too bad you won’t see it for another two years, at least. Unless you happen to live in a region like Contra Costa County in Northern California, where a tech-savvy local government is already hard at work on its own geographically targeted emergency alert system.

After nine days of nail-biting excitement, the Federal Communications Commission’s auction of the 700 MHz spectrum is beginning to wind down.”

I wrote that over a month ago, and boy was I wrong. Though the FCC is clearly keen to end it, the auction continues to drag on with cellphone companies fighting it out over niggling little bits of 12-megahertz B-Block spectrum in Albany, Ga., Yuba City and Imperial, Calif., Ashtabula, Ohio and Hunterdon, N.J. Apparently, pushing the clocks ahead an hour this past weekend didn’t do much good.

With bidding appearing to have entered the final stretch, the auction has raised nearly $20 billion, double the sum for which the FCC had hoped. Stifel Nicolaus analysts Blair Levin and Rebecca Arbogast predict it will end this week with Verizon (VZ) and AT&T (T) coming out as the auction’s biggest winners, and Google (GOOG) as a “willing loser.”

Microsoft isn’t always unrequited in love. This morning the software giant said it had agreed to acquire Danger Inc., maker of T-Mobile’s SideKick smart phone, for an undisclosed sum.

Why?

“It completes the picture for us in terms of making the transition from just being on the business side of things to being on the consumer side of things,” said Robbie Bach, Microsoft’s president of entertainment and devices.

Seems Microsoft really is serious about the consumer cellphone business after all. But what’s it going to do with Danger? Said Jupiter analyst Michael Gartenberg, “The SideKick had strong appeal as the anti-BlackBerry for younger audiences and it will be really interesting to see how MSFT integrates the technology, business model and overall device cachet to a culture more at home selling to enterprise CIOs than it is selling to rock stars.”

Could this be the beginning of a Zune-based cellphone ?

Q: So if this is not the Gphone, when will we see the Gphone, and what will it be?

Google CEO Eric Schmidt: We’re not announcing anything, but this is the platform for building a Gphone. It starts a whole wave of innovation …

Q: Does that mean there will be NO Google phone you can buy?

ES: Imagine not just one Gphone, but a thousand Gphones as a result of the partnerships … the many other people who will be joining the open initiative. We forgot to tell you that it’s available next week, and the terms are the broadest in the industry.

Q: ………..Gphone?

ES: We are not announcing a Google phone.

Q: Eric, I want to go back to the Gphone–what’s the deal?

ES: The deal is we don’t pre-announce products… if there were to be a Gphone, it would run Android.

–Excerpt from Google’s Nov. 5 Android analyst call

Google and Dell are collaborating on an Android-based cellphone?

Really?

Seems unlikely. Certainly, Google has said repeatedly that Android is intended not as a platform for building one Google-branded Gphone, but an entire ecosystem of them. And that will require the investment and commitment of a host of mobile-phone manufacturers–manufacturers who probably aren’t interested in developing handsets that run on a competitor’s platform.

A more likely scenario: Dell simply joins Google’s Open Handset Alliance and announces its own Android-based phone.

The number of iPhones bought with the intention of unlocking was significant in the quarter, but we are unsure how to reliably estimate the number. We are unsure when all the recipients will activate.”

–Apple Chief Operating Officer Timothy Cook, Jan. 22

So those “missing” iPhones? They’re not missing at all. They’re unlocked. That’s the opinion of a number of analysts who this week are looking askance at Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi’s claim that about 1.45 million phones were “missing in action” at the end of 2007–built but not subscribed to AT&T.

“Some unknown number of iPhones are being unlocked by purchasers and some, probably a larger number, are being unlocked for resale,” said Ezra Gottheil, an analyst at Technology Business Research Inc. “Some are in inventory. Some will be returned. And some are being used for the nonphone features, as iPhone Touches, until the owners can change their wireless contracts. We don’t know the proportions.”

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster offered a similar theory, noting that his recent check of Apple’s retail stores found a significant percentage of consumers to be purchasing multiple iPhones. “The majority of the people who were buying more than one phone were Asian, and they were bringing small buses of people who all buy more than one phone,” he told the New York Times. “With the value of the dollar, the cost of the phone is much less here.”

And Munster’s contention would seem to be borne out by anecdotal reports from abroad. “In my travels around the world, two out of three iPhones I’ve seen outside of the U.S. have been unlocked,” Richard Doherty, director at consultant Envisioneering Group, told BusinessWeek. “In China, nine out of 10 phones are hacked.”

Motorists who use cellphones while behind the wheel aren’t just dangerous. They also measurably impede the flow of traffic.

That’s the self-evident conclusion of a new study from the University of Utah’s Traffic Lab. Observing the behavior of undergraduate students parked in front of driving simulators and chatting on hands-free mobile phones, researchers found that they spent up to 31% more time tailing other slow drivers instead of passing in a faster-moving lane and drove–on average–2 mph slower than others. They took more time to regain freeway speeds after braking, too.

“At the end of the day, the average person’s commute is longer because of that person who is on the cellphone right in front of them,” said Dave Strayer, a University of Utah psychologist and leader of the research team. “That S.O.B. on the cellphone is slowing you down and making you late.”

Correction: those S.O.B.s. A January 2007 survey of 1,200 motorists by Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. found that 73% talk on cellphones while driving. Which is lousy news for the 23% who don’t. “It’s a bit like breaking wind in the elevator,” Peter Martin of the University of Utah’s Traffic Lab told Reuters. “Everyone suffers.”

They say you need to know about 2,000 different kanji pictograms in order to read a Japanese newspaper. So how the hell is Apple going to adapt the iPhone’s virtual keyboard for modern Japanese?

We’ll have the answer soon enough. “People familiar with the situation” tell The Wall Street Journal that Apple is in talks with NTT DoCoMo and Softbank–two of Japan’s premier wireless carriers–about offering its iPhone in Japan.

Discussions, however, are not going well. Both carriers have balked at Apple’s terms, which include a subscriber revenue share that some estimates put at about 10%. “The negotiations are not going smoothly, as Apple’s conditions are extremely hard to meet,” one source told Reuters. “The ball is in Apple’s court right now.”

But likely not for long. In order to meet its goal of gaining a 1% share of the global cellphone business by the end of 2008, Apple must bring the iPhone to market in Japan. Nomura Research Institute estimates that Apple can sell 2 million to 3 million iPhones annually in Japan–about 5% of the market–if it plays its cards right.