For a whole bunch of reasons I've decided to buy a smart phone and pay the usurious rates for mobile use that the big carriers charge. I've discovered that there doesn't seem to be any good forum to discuss what options are open to Canadian's at the moment.

My needs are:

• Email (currently my domain is hosted google apps - in a pinch I could become an exchange user).
• Good (at least better than adequate) web browsing.
• Battery life - needs to last the day
• Good phone
• Calendaring support
• Keyboard - I expect write some emails but not it won't be my bread and butter
• Wifi support - where possible I want to save money and get better performance
• GPS is cute - but I usually have a very good idea of where I'm.

At least until the end of the month the choice of carrier becomes very easy. Roger's is offering 6/GB of data for $30 a mth. That's on top of an already expensive voice package - but at least you don't risk being billed by the megabyte for checking something out on a website.

Notes

• I didn't include price since its largely irrelevant over the life of the contract.
• Why doesn't Roger's have the most recent phones from Palm, HP and HTC? They would all make serious contenders.

After talking to a few friends everything but the IPhone and Blackberry Bold were eliminated - too little screen real estate to be useful web browsers. Boy Genius has a comparison of both phones and concludes by saying: "The honest truth is that if we had to use only one of the two devices, we’d be happy enough with whichever one you gave us. We could deal with the email shortcomings on the iPhone, and we could deal with the improved but not incredible browser on the Bold. It really comes down to what you need more in a phone."

At this stage I think it will be the IPhone because of the incredible number of add-on apps that are available already. That said I was pleasantly surprised by how well the Palm Centro did in the reviews.

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