Using An Unlocked iPhone in Canada: What Features Work?

I received an email earlier from a reader that posed an interesting question: What works on an unlocked iPhone in Canada? Are there iPhone features that are missing? Are there any hidden costs or charges that could accrue by using an unlocked iPhone in Canada with Rogers or Fido? Well, I am going to relay what I responded to that reader in this post.

An unlocked iPhone in Canada will work EXACTLY the way it does in the United States. However, there are two features I can think of that will cause some problems for iPhone Canada users:

1) Lack of “Visual Voicemail”–this feature is exclusive to AT&T iPhone users in the USA

2) Lack of voicemail notification for Rogers and Fido users in Canada–this problem varies according to what firmware version your iPhone is. But if you read in my previous post about fixing SMS texts to receive voicemail notification with Fido and Rogers, then this should not be a problem at all.

Aside from these two, everything else works on my iPhone. YouTube works flawless, the Mail program is synced up to my Gmail account via IMAP (one of the best features on my iPhone), Safari browser works like a charm, the iPod works perfectly (along with videos and Coverflow), oh and one last thing–the PHONE part works too! 🙂

Here are a few pictures to illustrate…screenshots of my iPhone for your viewing pleasure (if you have any doubt–erase it! The iPhone is for you as along the firmware is not 1.1.2 as the phone part has not been figured out yet). Here we have two shots of my springboard, the weather app, stocks, world clock, and one of my most used features, Google Maps. With Google Maps, you can preload directions to a destination and it will download to the phone. So it works great when you need directions somewhere as the applications gives you step by step instructions, even with a map.

My iPhone “Springboard”; The picture on the right shows up after I “sweep” to the left with my finger to reveal more icons:

springboard1.jpg springboard2.jpg

Weather & World Clock:

weather.jpgiphone_world-clock.jpg

Stocks and Google Maps (notice how entering YVR will automatically bring up the Vancouver International Airport):

iphone_stocks.jpggooglemaps_iphone.jpg

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