The first thing you need to understand: if you don’t make some changes to your existing plan and you just go about using your phone like you do every day, you’re going to come home to a very nasty surprise in the form of a Rogers bill that will have you immediately applying for a government bailout package. I hear those are actually becoming hard to get, so you might want to keep reading.

The second thing you need to understand: there are at least three ways that Rogers is going to get you drunk and take advantage of you. And I don’t mean that in the sort of ha-ha-ha frat party sense. I mean it in the posting videos of you running naked down Yonge Street with indelible ink all of your body sense.

• Phone Calls that Hurt: Calls from the US back to Canada are billed at an astounding rate of $1.70/minute. Don’t answer calls from your friends at home (unless they’re calling to tell you that you won the lottery) since incoming Canadian calls are billed at $1.20/minute. You might think of calling ahead to Iron Works BBQ while you’re in Austin, but you better really want those ribs because that call is going to cost you $0.95/minute (hope you’re not on hold!).
• Text Messages Full of Pain: The good news is that incoming text messages are free. Just don’t reply to them (or even think of — say — trying to make plans with a group of people), since outgoing text messages are charged at the simply mind boggling rate of $0.60/message.
• Data with Very Sharp Edges: Oh sweet 3G data! Nectar of the web gods and very much priced accordingly. You’ll get dinged for $0.03/kb while you’re roaming, which means that you just paid about $10.50 if you’re reading this from my actual site on your Canadian iPhone (~350kb * 0.03 = $10.50). Hope it was worth it!

Is it really any wonder that all of their customers hate them?

There is some good news though, so read on before you abandon all technology and become a tinfoil hat wearing hermit somewhere in the northern reaches of the Great White North.

After a lengthy call to Rogers that involved putting me on hold for at least 3 or 4 minutes to answer every question, and a whole bunch of digging through their obtuse website filled to the brim with pop-up windows and other web browsing novelties from 1996, I’ve been able to catalogue The Ultimate Down South Traveler’s Guide for Rogers Customers. Here’s how to mostly avoid waking up in a gutter with a massive Rogers bill stuffed in a very uncomfortable place:

• Phone Calls that Feel Good: I was completely unable to find info about this on their site, but I’ve now added an option to my account that gives me 120 minutes of calling, over and above my normal plan, anywhere in the US or Canada, for $60/month. All of those calls will be treated as local calls, so there’s no roaming rates applied at all. If you’re a less frequent phone user, there’s a 60 minute option for $40/month. At an average of $1.28/minute for calls without this plan, I’m saving about $94 if I use all of the time.
• Text Messages Still Full of Pain: I have no good news here. I was told that there’s no way to send text messages while in the US for less than $0.60/message.
• Data with Dull Edges: There’s a little good news here. You can add the US Data Roaming Add-On to your account for $10/month, which takes data from $0.03/kb to $0.001/kb. That’s still a little pricey, but at least this page would only cost $0.35 to read instead of $10.50. Another way to look at it: the $10 you pay up front would have bought about 300kb of data without the add-on. Worth it if you think you might do more than look at a single image.

You can apparently have them add the packages for a fixed amount of time and have them automatically come off again. I’m doing quite a bit of US travelling for the rest of March, so I’ve had them add it when I leave for SXSW and take it off when I come back from my final trip at the beginning of April. I trust Rogers to actually have things activate and deactivate about as much as I trusted Halliburton with the reconstruction of Iraq, so I’ll be monitoring my bill like a hawk.

Avoid Charges Without Changes

Here are some steps you can take to avoid additional charges on your iPhone if you don’t want to make a bunch of changes to your account:

• When Your Phone is Not a Phone: Don’t make or receive any phone calls. If someone calls you, check the number in case it really is important enough to pay for and then double-click the Lock/Power button to send them straight to voicemail if it isn’t. Since SXSW provides free wireless to all attendees, install an application like fring and use your iPhone as a Skype handset (including Skype In/Out) or as a SIP client if you have access to an Asterisk box. Note that the wireless often gets completely overloaded, so don’t rely on this one.
• Inbound Text Messages Only: Receive all you want, but don’t send ‘em. Let people txt you and then you either phone them, email them, or Twitter direct message them (since your data will be “cheap” and there’s a good chance they have incoming DMs going to their phone as text messages if they’re in the US).
• Data on the Cheap: Make sure you turn off Data While Roaming so that your iPhone doesn’t run up a massive bill for you (you’ll find it under Settings > General > Network > Data While Roaming). That will switch of EDGE/3G data but not WiFi, so you should still be fine to use wireless networks you stumble across. If you’re staying in a hotel that offers free wireless (or even cheap wireless), consider either bringing a WiFi router to share it out to all your devices (and friends!), or use your Mac to share your Ethernet connection wirelessly.

Did I Miss Anything?

Know any great tips or tricks that my research didn’t uncover? Leave them in the comments so everyone can benefit!

Notes on Rates

• All of the rates quoted above are in effect on March 8th, 2009.
• Rates for calls, text messages, and data from the US are from International GSM/GPRS Roaming. Select “United States” to trigger a pop-up window with all of the sordid details.
• None of the above applies if you’re travelling outside of the US. If you thought the rates were bad below the 49th, be thankful that SXSW doesn’t happen in Europe where calls are at least $2.00/minute.

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My assumption is that Palm (PALM) would try to take market share by coming in significantly lower than the $200 or so Apple wants for its iPhone. But when I ran that theory by Palm CEO Ed Colligan, he looked at me liked I’d peed on his rug. “Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product,” he asked, then walked away.

– Peter Kafka, Media Memo, allthingsD.com

I’d say it’s a little early for Ed and crew to be counting their hatched iPhone killers. These are, of course, the same people who tried to foist the Foleo onto an unsuspecting public (and showed the wisdom to cancel it a few months later when no one appeared interested in being foisted upon). Video and music capabilities or corporate email support also weren’t disclosed, leaving the iPhone and Blackberry with at least two potential raison d’êtres (worth noting that the screenshots of the Launcher show “Music” and “Videos” apps). At least we can watch pretty videos of touch screens and gestural input until we know more about what’s in or out and how many precious golden angels will need to be sacrificed:

I’m curious about the gesture area below the screen. The device is fairly small as it is and it looks like they’ve dedicated the bottom strip to being for gestures when it could have been available for more screen real estate. I do like the way it lights up when you touch it, but would it have been more useful if the whole screen was for gestures and display? Guess we’ll find out.

I spent a little while going through the gallery of screenshots on the graphic-heavy but info-light (and slightly odd) Pre website. I can’t give you a link to it directly due to the way it was built, so go to the main Pre page, scroll down past the fold where it doesn’t look like there will be anything, then click on “See gallery” in the Connected calendars and contacts section to get started. You can then keep clicking the faint and hard to see right arrow at the extreme right edge of the page to move to the next set of screenshots. (Also weird? Scroll your browser window up or down after you open the gallery).

A few things I like the look of:

Palm Pre Calendar

I like the crunched up free time indicator that lets the calendar show more info on the screen while still giving you an at-a-glance call on whether you have time to hit Starbucks.

Palm Pre Card View

Being able to ‘background’ an application and do other things while it keeps running is one of the things sorely missing from the iPhone. The Pre has a notion of ‘cards’ which contain running apps and supports a few different gestural mechanisms to get into ‘card view’ where you can swipe left/right to move through the deck. You obviously can’t see it here, but the cards are live views in to the app and will continue to show animation or (presumably) playing video when you move into card view. It’s a clever way to support multitasking with minimal input and maintains that at-a-glance intuitive understanding that’s so key in mobile devices.

Palm Pre Integrated Calendars and Email

These are the best screenshots I could find to illustrate the “web” in “Palm WebOS”. Everything the device does is about connectivity, shown here in the form of Google and Palm calendars (top) and Gmail and regular mail (bottom) automatically integrated into a single view.

As with all things of this nature, I’ll only know how well it works when I’ve had a chance to play with it. The devil is in the details of the interactions, not in the pretty icons and design (nice as it may be). I’m going to try to get one in for Mr. Mobile, so stay tuned for a more in-depth look.

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1. Tapping in the bottom left and right corner of the pages of your home screen will page left/right without needing to drag across.
2. Tapping the ’status’ bar at the top of the screen, which usually has the clock in it, will scroll back to the top of really long pages. Try it in Safari next time you’re browsing a really long page and want to get back to the top.
3. Holding down the Home button and pressing the Power/Lock button on the top of the phone will take a screenshot of whatever is on the screen right now, saving it into your Photos app.
4. Everyone knows you can zoom in on Maps by double-tapping, but few people know you can zoom back out by tapping with two fingers.
5. You can hold your finger on a link in Safari to see where it goes before you decide you want to follow it. Great for saving bandwidth!
6. Hold your finger on keyboard buttons for 2 seconds to get a pop-up with accented versions of that character. Try it on the . key in Mail to get a pop-up with .net/.edu/.org/.com.
7. Send callers straight to voicemail by clicking the Power/Lock button twice.
8. Sometimes you have music playing in the iPod app and need to pause it or skip a track but you’re off in Safari browsing pages. Instead of going back to the Home screen to change it, double-click the Home button to get an overlay of iPod controls.
9. Speaking of the Home screen, double-clicking the button while you’re on another page in the Home app will take you back to the first screen.
10. You can customize the apps in the tab bar at the bottom of the iPod app by tapping More, then Edit, and then dragging new icons to the bar.

Have any great tips I’ve missed? Leave them below…

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