Pay $250 more to avoid being trapped into a 3-year contract with Rogers?? Absolutely!!! I'll be doing it, for several reasons.

1) The additional cost now is less than canceling my contract a year or two down the road. It can cost up to $200 A YEAR to cancel a contract (not sure what Rogers policies are on this front since I don't have a contract with them now), so if a new company comes along next year with a product that I like, it could cost $400 to cancel out of the remaining 2 years of the contract. I might consider a 1-year contract, possibly even 2-years. Definitely not 3 years. I've cancelled almost every 3-year contract I've signed with a cell phone company (first Rogers, then Telus, then Bell). At some point, a carrier will annoy me, or another carrier will have a better product or plan, so I will jump ship.

2) I'll likely upgrade my hardware again in eight months to a year. I want the flexibility to go where I want when I want. RIM is likely to make its best devices for GSM first, but if they turned over a different leaf and released something in a CDMA model that I want, I'd have no qualms switching carriers again. I never keep my devices for more than a year, so there's no point in getting trapped into a contract just to save a few dollars. I'll have to pay the full price the next time, and there are just too many disadvantages for me with long-term contracts.

3) Yes, I think there is a very good chance that there will be a new carrier in Canada in the next year or two. The government just sold off a bunch of new bandwidth to several new companies. They might choose to go with CDMA, but considering the rumours that I've been reading about Telus and Bell starting to switch their towers over to GSM, I think new companies would be smart to start out with GSM rather than CDMA. This would create some competition in the GSM field in Canada and I want the option to be able to switch carriers overnight without having to pay a cancellation penalty.