Windows Phone Thoughts: HTC and Rogers Wireless Announce the HTC Shift

"Rogers Wireless, the leading wireless carrier in Canada, and HTC Corp., a global leader in smartphone design and manufacturing, today announced that the world’s first mobile PC with push email - the HTC Shift™ – mobile computer will be released in Canada by Rogers Wireless, on Canada’s fastest mobile network from the people that built Canada’s most reliable network. The state-of-the-art HTC Shift X9501 is a pure data powerhouse that gives customers the best of all worlds; the power and familiarity of Windows Vista, the comfort and ease of touch screen technology via the Microsoft Origami™ Experience 2.0, and the impressive speed of the Rogers 3G HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) network for an unmatched mobile computing experience that can be used seamlessly around the globe. With a sleek design that is half the size and a fraction of the weight of a standard notebook, the HTC Shift X9501 combines extreme portability with cutting-edge software like HTC SnapVUE™, which gives customers instant access to true push email and SMS with up to three days of battery life."



This is an interesting hybrid device so I'm posting about it on Pocket PC Thoughts, Smartphone Thoughts, and Digital Home Thoughts. Rogers is essentially the only GSM-based mobile phone carrier in Canada (can you spell "monopoly"?), and they carry a good assortment of HTC products - the latest of which is the Shift. But their launch is wobbly at best - I've been holding off on posting this news for several hours hoping that things would start to make sense.

Earlier today the URL I was given for further information (www.rogers.com/shift) resulted in a 404 page not found error. Now it finally resolves to a page, but it's in French. My French is a bit rusty, but thankfully numbers are universal: it looks like if you want to purchase that Shift outright, without a contract, it will run you $2099 CAD (about $2170 USD). If you sign up for a three year contract, it will cost you $1699 CAD (there's some sort of promo on where it's $1599, but there are no details on that). To put those costs into perspective, you can purchase the HTC Shift directly from Expansys for $1465 USD [affiliate], so it seems like Rogers is making a big chunk of change on these devices.

The real kicker with mobile devices in Canada is the data rate plans - and I can find no information from Rogers about a new data plan that makes sense. The press release references a "$50 Flex Rate Data Plan", yet using Rogers' own search engine, there's no record of any such plan. I'm holding out a bit of hope, but once again it seems that we have some nice hardware that's largely crippled from real use by the wallet-crushing data plans that Rogers offers.