Hi,
I am in Canada and I know some people who are outside the United States have done what I did to try out the News app which at this point is only available for iOS 9 users in the United States and I think the UK and Australia. Basically, all you have to do to make the News app show up if you are in Canada or another country is to change your country to United States in Settings > General > Language and Region. I remember asking at the time if there were any drawbacks to doing this and most people who replied didn't think there were problems with this. Now I can tell you about one issue I encountered which ended up costing me about $600 Canadian. I should state that most likely I would have spend the money anyways, but it was a bit of a surprise. I should mention that after I tried the News app a few times I went back to using the CBC app (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and I more or less forgot that I hadn't changed my region back to Canada. Here is what happened: My wife is from the Philippines and we were planning to go for a visit in February next year. I had plenty of Aeroplan points (one of our reward programs here) to book 2 flights, but the problem is that you are limited to certain airlines which are part of the STAR alliance and the only airline which flies Vancouver to Manila non-stop is Philippine Airlines and they are not in this alliance. All other flights would have meant going via Seoul, South Korea, Beiging, China, Hong Kong or Tokyo, Japan. This of course adds at least 4 or 5 hours to an already 14 hour flight so I decided to fire up my Expedia app which is super accessible and see what sort of flights were offered by Philippine Airlines. To my surprise I saw direct flights for around $840 and even with a points flight we would have had to pay about $500 to $550 in taxes and fees. It did cross my mind whether this was maybe $840 US which currently converts to a bit over $1,100 Canadian so I called Expedia customer service and asked. I told the agent that I was in Canada and I was using the app and he said now, what I saw was in Canadian currency. I then went ahead and booked 2 flights and needless to say, a few days later when I went online to check my Visa statement I saw that the $840 had been converted to $1,135 Canadian, about $300 more than what I saw on Expedia. I was about to call Expedia again and complain bitterly about having been given incorrect information and all that, then I thought I better make sure my phone was setup correctly and of course when I went to Language and Region settings my region was set to United States. I changed it back to Canada and then went ahead and did another search in Expedia for the same flights and this time Voiceover clearly read the price as "840 US Dollars" where before when it thought I was in the United States it only read it as "840 Dollars". When I saw the $840 it did look too good to be true and I guess it was, but even $1,135 Canadian is actually not too bad of a deal and considering the convenience of a non-stop flight probably means I would have booked it anyways, but it nonetheless would have been nice to know in advance. I thought I post this here so others know that changing your region may have consequences one may not necessarily think of at the time and doing so just to get the News app which down the road will hopefully be available here in Canada by default is in my opinion not worth the trouble. Regards, Sieghard -- The following information is important for all members of the VIPhone list. If you have any questions or concerns about the running of this list, or if you feel that a member's post is inappropriate, please contact the owners or moderators directly rather than posting on the list itself. Your VIPhone list owner is Cara Quinn - you can reach Cara at caraqu...@caraquinn.com The archives for this list can be searched at http://www.mail-archive.com/viphone@googlegroups.com/. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "VIPhone" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to viphone+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to viphone@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/viphone. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
