This time was going to be different.

I knew that going out. For too long, we Canadians have traveled to the US, and essentially shut our phones off before crossing the border. And while I have a great time in cities like New York, Chicago and (most recently) Boston, there’s a great degree of handicap attached to being in a foreign land without that great security blanket. Having ubiquitous Internet is arguably even more important while traveling; so it’s ironic that traveling is the time you can get it the least.

But not this time. For this weekend trip to Boston, I took along my iPhone, and a little plan: to get myself an AT&T account, and get my iPhone 4 running domestically while I’m in the US. Turns out it’s fully possible, but it ain’t nearly as easy as it ought to be.

A Word About The Ethics of the Carrier Lock

The very first hurdle is one I crossed while still at home, and it’s by far the most contentious for anyone looking to accomplish this feat. When you buy an iPhone in most countries, the device is locked to a particular carrier. In the US and Canada, an iPhone 4 bought for $199 is subsidized, and is therefore tied to work only on that carrier’s network. This is standard industry practice, and as far as I can tell, its only purpose is to protect the carrier’s investment in the phone subsidy, forcing you to remain with that network long enough to repay the balance of what’s owed on the phone. This is why you should be within your rights to ask your carrier to “unlock” your phone at the end of your contract term.

But let’s be realistic. In my case, at least, I’m not looking to leave my carrier. They are still getting my money every month. But for three days, I want to get reasonable voice and data rates. So while I’m still paying Fido (my carrier in Canada), I think there is no moral dilemma in breaking the carrier lock to get it to work in another country. After all, that’s the whole point of the GSM/GPRS system: trans-national compatibility! The Europeans have been enjoying this for many years, and by gum, I want to join the party.

This whole conversation would be moot if my carrier made me a decent offer to use my plan in the US. But that’s of course not the case. My carrier does offer a “travel pack”, but to take advantage of it would break that “reasonable” rule from the last paragraph. Here’s what Fido has to offer (I believe that Rogers has an identical plan):

You can see the whole page here. That’s a lot of money for very little data.

Picking the US Plan

Conversely, AT&T offers Pay As You Go plans for their customers, under a brand called “GoPhone”. In their perfect world, you can walk off the street, buy one of their dedicated “GoPhones”, and pay to refill it with voice minutes and data as needed. You can buy a refill card for prices starting at $25, which gives you a certain amount of voice calling. You can also buy a block of 100 MB of data for $20. This isn’t exactly stellar, but it’s way better than what Fido has on offer.

But it’s not an easy proposition. First off, that carrier lock needs unlocking. Then, you have to talk AT&T into giving you a SIM card for their network (and remember it needs to be a micro-SIM if you’ve got an iPhone 4). Then you have to activate the SIM, which gives you a phone number and allows you to add minutes and data.

Unfortunately, much of your success in this will rely on your luck in finding a cooperative AT&T store clerk. In my case, I was able to acquire a micro-SIM from one AT&T store, but he wouldn’t activate it for me, insisting that it wouldn’t work in an iPhone (he’s right, by the way, but there’s a very simple workaround which I’ll get to momentarily). Fortunately, there was another store just up the street where the guy was willing to just do his freaking job and give me what I was asking for.

Okay, that was a lot of narrative to get to a step-by-step process. Here’s exactly what you need to do to go from locked Canadian iPhone to unlocked, American, Pay As You Go:

1. Jailbreak your iPhone. Oh, don’t roll your eyes. Jailbreaking is awesome, and everyone should do it (Reason number one is the brilliant, $20 MyWi, which creates a wireless network using your 3G connection). If you are running iOS 4.0, go to http://jailbreakme.com and it’ll be done in a heartbeat. Otherwise, downgrade to 4.0.

2. Install Ultrasn0w. This is the free tool that unlocks your iPhone. You can find it in the Cydia app store that gets installed with the jailbreak. If you can’t find it, check these instructions.

3. In the US, visit a local AT&T store. Tell them you are visiting from another country, and would like to activate a SIM for your phone. If they ask what phone you’ve got, cough and mutter it under your breath. Don’t meet their eyes. Say it’s for a friend. But above all else, be insistent that it’s cool, you know what you’re doing, and if they could just do what you ask and stop injecting their brain-melting ignorance, then your feelings of stabby-ness will blissfully subside. Tell them you want to use their GoPhone plans. The SIM card should cost you nothing; it’s the gateway to paying them to be on their network. If they have a SIM card to give you, you should be able to get at least that. (In my case, I had to get that on one trip, and visit a different store to activate it.)

4. During activation, choose your options. They have a number of options in their GoPhone portfolio. I chose a $3/day unlimited calling plan, which gets activated automatically whenever you make a call. I also got the $20 100MB data package. Be wary about this one, though: it automatically gets renewed every month unless you cancel it, which you can easily do from their web site. I got plenty of warning about this, but just keep an eye.

5. Change your APN (Access Point Name). This is the trick to making it all work. The first AT&T guy I visited said the iPhone wouldn’t work, and it’s because of the APN. But it turns out you can change it very easily, and it doesn’t require a jailbreak (although let’s face it, you probably had to do it already to get here). Just visit http://unlockit.nz, and follow the instructions to have a profile created and installed for the AT&T network. Essentially, this profile just tells your phone the name of its network, and the server to look to for getting online. When you return to your home country, you can easily remove the profile by going to Settings > General > Profile.

6. Pop in the new SIM card. There is no step 7.

From that point on, it was like I was an American using my iPhone in my own damn country.

Of course, I reset the data usage counter so I could keep an eye on my progress against the 100MB that I purchased (Settings > Usage > Reset Statistics). Turns out that you really can burn through that pretty quick, especially if you tether to your MacBook! And even as I write this on the evening of an unexpected extra night in Boston (damn you, rain!), I just tripped over 100MB, shutting down the wireless party. Ah well. To refresh another 100MB, just dial *611 on your phone and follow the instructions.

I only have one more comment to make before I wrap this up. American iPhone users have been complaining about AT&T’s quality of service since the launch back in 2007. As a Canadian spoiled by the delicious Rogers/Fido network, I very quickly learned how right they are. Of course I can’t speak for anywhere else in the US, but the reliability of my service in Boston was absolutely terrible. In Fenway Park, for example, I spent most of the time on Edge networking, and even that was next to useless. In other parts of the city, I’d show four or five bars, but still not get a connection to the network. It was appalling compared to what I’m used to at home.

But the good news is, having gone through this pain, I now have a SIM card that I can swap into my phone anytime I visit the States, charge it up with data and minutes, and move on with my life. It’s a pretty sweet feeling.

Okay, pop quiz: what’s going to be on the next iPad’s feature list?

You’d probably say one thing right away: the same Retina Display that has made the iPhone 4 such a treat. After all, one look at the precision and crispness of that display, its indistinguishability from paper, its placement directly beneath the glass such that you feel like you’re manipulating the pixels directly, and it’s clear this technology will be propagating everywhere Apple needs to show stuff.

Some developers I follow on Twitter talk about the Retina Display like it’s a sine qua non; without it, the iPad (which lacks it) is a greatly diminished experience. Apple must love to hear that.

This hasn’t been my opinion. Since acquiring the iPhone 4 last Friday, I’ve marvelled at the quality of the display, but I noted that it hasn’t changed the rules for how and to what extent you present information to the user. In other words, while the pixels have gotten smaller, your finger is stubbornly the same size.

But that’s not to say I won’t be excited by the Retina Display-enabled iPad when it arrives. And that’s the nut here: Apple is the expert at this technique of predictive marketing, and they’ve been doing it for a very long time.

For a company that has a track record for introducing “totally new” products (the iPod, the iPhone, the iPad), there’s always a thread, a technology story, that users can trace from what already exists to the new device. The Retina Display is just the latest example. Go back one step: before the iPhone 4 came out, we had the iPad with its super-fast Apple A4 chip. The company went to great pain to tell us all about it. And the early press, along with direct experience, showed us that the A4 was indeed blindingly fast.

Gee, wouldn’t it be great if that chip were in the next iPhone? So when that did happen, we already knew what we were getting, so to speak. No matter what else the iPhone 4 featured, we knew it would run apps like nobody’s business.

Other examples abound, where the company has introduced features on one platform, and rolled it out to successive generations of product. On the Mac side, recall Apple’s introduction of (what I like to think of as) their next-generation power management system, on the 17-inch MacBook Pro. For the first time, they offered a ten-hour battery life, owing to a significantly larger battery and vastly improved electronics for managing it. I had just bought the previous-generation 15-inch MacBook Pro, so I was stuck with my measly 2.5-hour battery life.

Over the past two years, that technology has trickled down into all of Apple’s laptops, even the white polycarbonate MacBook. And I couldn’t be more excited: I know what I’m getting when I get my next laptop, and that improved, well-understood benefit will ensure that I upgrade.

The ignorant people talk about Apple as if they’re all about surface appeal. We know better: many companies — including Apple — nail that on the first iteration of a product. But the company continually hones its offerings, adding new improvements that are so clearly superior to what they had before, that users feel compelled to upgrade. Hence the lines on iOS device launch days.

No other company is in a position to so successfully work their customers in the same way. I dismiss Microsoft and its PC hegemony out of hand — they are more interested in preserving their lead and stopped innovating years ago. Google with Android comes close, but its hardware ecosystem is so complicated that we need a scorecard to tell the difference between identical hardware from the same vendor (Samsung, I’m looking at you).

How the hell are users supposed to connect one innovation with the next-generation’s offering? In short, they can’t. And that means a customer isn’t going to have a particular loyalty to the brand. That customer will buy whatever phone the guy at the store recommends that year, and they’ll probably come in again two years later and do the same thing.

An Apple customer, on the other hand, will actively seek out the next iPhone when their contract is up, and they’ll know exactly what they’re getting: something already great, but even better. Apple has spoiled us for the next model, and every launch is not just an ad for that product, but for the next iteration of the other products.

Ever get the feeling that this company is an unstoppable juggernaut?