How would you feel if the government decided which mobile phone you were allowed to buy? Pretty pissed off, I'd imagine. How dare it restrict you to a few models with inferior capabilities? What gall.

Fortunately, the government has stepped away from such decisions. The wonderful free-enterprise marketplace–the one your dollars get to vote in–has jurisdiction over your buying options. Except when the companies that make such decisions decide to restrict our options in order to fatten their profits.

I can think of three excellent mobile phones available in the States that aren't being sold here. One, of course, is Apple's iPhone. I expect that this one will eventually show up in Canada (too many people know about it), though I'm not particularly interested in buying an iPhone; I want a real, physical keyboard (not a touch screen), so I can type properly in any location without having to lug a laptop around. That's what I have right now, with the fabulous Hiptop2 phone that Fido sold before Rogers bought it and turned it from a real company into a gutless boutique brand.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm the kiss of death for decent cellphone companies. Back in the late 1990s, I had a respectable Sanyo phone from Clearnet. Then Telus bought the company, ditched all the innovative features like per-second billing, and seemed to do something to reduce the quality of service. That's only an anecdotal observation, but it's something my dentist also noticed, and it gave us something to talk about besides bootleg Bruce Springsteen recordings and my aversion to flossing.

Eventually, I called Telus to end my service, which meant wasting 10 minutes of my life while some kind of loss-prevention expert tried to talk me out of making that choice. But she blew it (and made me angry) by suggesting that maybe my signal reception would be improved if I bought a new phone. That made me think of just two words, and they weren't "Merry Christmas".

Besides, I didn't need Telus. I had already bought this fine Hiptop2 from Fido (pre-Rogers), the Canadian version of the Sidekick line so popular in the U.S., with all its product-placement appearances and celebrity users. Naturally, I anticipated upgrading to whatever the Sidekick 3 would be called up here, but Rogers presumably felt that such a good device would have a negative impact on its lucrative BlackBerry business, so we won't be seeing it up here, it seems.

That's the second phone we Canadians are being blocked from buying. The third is the oddly named but very impressive Ocean, from a company called Helio (www.helio.com/), which has GPS and Google Maps support. There's a fan site that's worth a look (www.helioocean.com/). Like the Sidekick/Hiptop, this phone also has excellent documentation on Wikipedia.

There's a fourth device called the mylo from an obscure little company called Sony (www.sony.com/mylo/). Technically it's not a cellphone, but it does allow you to make Skype phone calls over wireless networks. It has a proper-size keyboard and some interesting multimedia features. Seeing as no Canadian company is willing to sell me a decent text-capable cellphone, maybe I'll just buy one of these on eBay instead. Calls to the other 100 million plus Skype users would be free, while talking to non-Skypers within North America would cost a couple of cents per minute. Let's see Rogers, Bell, or Telus beat those rates.

Now, before somebody writes in to tell me how they manage to limp by just fine using the scrunched-in keyboards on their BlackBerry, Treo, Starcom, Moto Q, or whatever, let me just mention one other feature those phones all lack: support for JavaScript in their Web browsers. That's been a standard feature of all decent desktop browsing software for quite some time, yet it is mysteriously missing from all of those phones. Is it technologically impossible? Probably not–my obsolete Hiptop2 has it. True, there's a way you can hack it onto Palm-based devices, but I can't understand why it's not standard on BlackBerrys.

As for phones that use the aggravating Windows Mobile software, well, Microsoft has a long history of trying to deny its consumers access to innovative software created by other companies. That means no Java. Too bad, or I'd probably settle for a Moto Q. Then again, maybe somebody's figured out a way to install a version of Linux on those. I'll look into it. Otherwise, I guess when my Fido contract expires in August I'll just get an ordinary low-cost pay-as-you-go phone for emergencies (from Bell, I guess–might as well give it an equal opportunity to disappoint me) and use Internet phone service at home. And there I'll wait until a decent mobile phone shows up here, which probably won't be until the government actually allows some free-market competition in the cellular business. Which is the topic of next week's rant, er, column.