iphone4_4I am excited waiting for the new iPhone 4 to be available tomorrow! I keep telling myself NOT to jump and make an impulsive purchase, but being the “gadget guy” I am, I love my toys. I know Apple has had a lot of bad press about the antenna problems with this phone, but not everyone is having the problem (with my luck I will). I guess I keep telling myself wait… you’ll get stung again, as you usually do by jumping too fast. Apple says the “bumper”, which is a rubber case for the phone, will fix the issue, but some people says it takes away from the look of the phone. I ALWAYS have a rubber case on mine. I can’t hang on to anything slippery so it helps, and gives it some protection if I drop the phone. I did find that my old Blackberry would bounce pretty good and keep ticking.

I have been watching the Apple web site to see if they are allowing pre-orders, but they aren’t. So tonight, I’ll have to sit up till midnight to place my order online. Hopefully they won’t do the update from California in the Pacific time zone. I’d have to get up at 4am!! Yikes. I want to buy the unit online rather than from a dealer. Why? iPhone 4’s will be unlocked in Canada, unlike other countries. This means, I can travel to the USA, go into an AT&T store, purchase s SIM card and a pay-as-you-go plan and save myself a lot of money over the roaming charges we incur. However, you pay dearly for this option. Is it worth it? I’m not sure. Canadian providers offer an expensive US package of something like 100 minutes of long distance for $40 that you can add on when you travel. I did this one with BELL when we went to Florida. BELL uses Sprint down there and almost all my calls got dropped because of Sprint’s crappy service. So it wasn’t worth it. But if I purchase the phone from a dealer like BELL, the phone will be locked to BELL and I’d have to pay them to unlock it if I wanted to use it with AT&T when in the states.

I’m due for an upgrade and I think I can get $250 off the price of a new phone IF I take a three year contract with BELL. My contract expires in January. But I’m not sure I want to lock myself in for that long a period or not.

Decisions! Knowing me… I’ll end up going to the dealer and buying it in the morning. It will be locked to BELL, but if I purchase it outright I don’t change my contract. There are a lot of new cell providers starting up that the competition to lower prices will hopefully convince the big guys to lower their prives. I’m still pissed they charge for text messages which cost them nothing. I’ll keep you posted on how it all turns out and what issues I run into with the new phone.