Canada's Rogers to Carry Two Google Android-Based Smartphones Next Month

Canada’s largest wireless carrier apparently is much better at acquiring cell phone partnerships than the naming rights to baseball stadiums.

 

During the offseason prior to 2005, Rogers Communications – parent company of Rogers Wireless (News - Alert) – bought Toronto’s SkyDome, home of the big-league baseball’s Canadian hold-out, the Blue Jays, for $25 million. In four full seasons since then, the team that plays at Rogers Centre has posted a mediocre 336-312 record and failed to make the postseason once (the team had won the World Series back-to-back in 1992 and 1993).

 

Yet today, in a move that signals more activity in the increasingly busy wireless carrier market, Rogers Wireless announced that next month it will become the exclusive carrier in Maple Leaf Nation for two smartphones powered by the open source Google Android platform: the HTC (News - Alert) Dream (pictured below) and HTC Magic.

 

According to John Boynton, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Rogers Wireless, the HTC Magic’s special features include its touch screen and the HTC Dream’s include both a touch screen and a slide out QWERTY keyboard.

 

“Both devices offer outstanding wireless Internet search capabilities and a full suite of applications that run two times faster on Canada’s fastest mobile network,” Boynton said.

 

The platform – which now also supports a netbook – is a flexible, scalable system that takes advantage, as all open source products do, of an increasingly important world of developers.

 

In sewing up exclusive carrier rights, Rogers Wireless takes an important step – and one that one of the United States’ largest carriers, AT&T (News - Alert), likely wishes it had extended even longer in its iPhone deal, which is said to expire next year. (Rumors are swirling that Verizon could emerge as a carrier for the Apple (News - Alert) device – a frightening prospect for AT&T).

 

Officials at Rogers released no details of the Android (News - Alert) phone launch, but directed customers to their Web site to sign up for more information (we’ll also have updates, news analysis and product release details posted here on TMCnet).

 

For Rogers’ sake, let’s hope the HTC launch goes as well as the Blue Jays’ 2009 campaign: The team is in first place now, about a month into the season.