It’s no secret that I have one of the infamous 1.3 million missing iPhones with me, here in Montreal.

I only recently activated the phone features though, then found out that it took special (though widly published) credentials to be able to use Rogers’ EDGE network from the device.

So I tried the latter a few days ago, and got somewhat of a nasty surprise after trying to load one (yes, only one) Facebook page through Mobile Safari: it ended up costing me around $8.00… Ooops, I guess I won’t be doing that under my pay-as-you-go account…

I did find this a bit dishonest puzzling, since the same account (and SIM) allowed me to browse the mobile web for $0.05 per page from my older Motorola phone. Of course, there’s a difference between quasi-text-only pages vs. a standard page and all the attached media elements, but still…

The obvious conclusion was that I’d wait to use EDGE until I could score a decent data plan, since gaining the voice and SMS features was really what I was looking for when unlocking my device.

Looking for signs of such a plan, I found out that Rogers in fact recently released an unlimited data plan, without much fanfare, now matching Bell Canada’s $7.00/month offering. Details are very scarce and I’m not entirely sure this truly applies to my needs or if some types of weird partnership-based limitations are involved, but it’s definitely worth looking into. Unfortunately, the plan excludes anything but what Rogers wants to peddle, which still makes Bell’s offer a much better choice, but is unfortunately incompatible with the iPhone GSM capabilities (vs. CDMA)…

Now to top it all off, here is what happened to me this morning and what every iPhone-totting Canadian must be aware of: I was waiting for the bus, browsing the web from my iPhone while connected to a public hotspot (hence why I’m not really in a rush to get EDGE browsing activated). Reception wasn’t great though, being a bit far from the source, and what ensued led me to find out that Rogers has indeed tweaked/opened their network for increased and simplified data access: even though I had cleared out the credentials previously required to access the web through EDGE, it turns out that my iPhone did switch from wifi to EDGE in the middle of my session.

Of course, the reason I realized the latter fact was that my account quickly went from $7.00 left to $0.00… So unless you do have a ([un]limited) data plan, be very careful if you run an unlocked iPhone in Canada: the usual trick to disable EDGE (ie: not entering the special credentials) will not work anymore, and you might end up with a pretty bad surprise on your bill. Turning off Data Roaming (Settings -> General -> Network -> Data Roaming = off) won’t help either, since Rogers is my carrier. Just be sure that Mail.app doesn’t automatically checks for new messages (Settings -> Mail -> Auto-Check = manual), and avoid using network-based apps unless you have a good wifi connection.

We’re getting We’ll hopefully get there… At a somewhat totally depressing rate, given countries like Iran and Estonia have better data rates and networks than we do…