Not much else is known about the deal. AT&T spokesmen said Tuesday it’s has no further details to share about the contract-free deal. Those looking for a contract-free iPhone may have to wait a few months after the initial mania and retail shortages have died down. The US carrier likely has an iPhone 3G release timetable that’ll maximize its contractual data plans.

Of course the subsidized prices have already been announced for the United States from AT&T. Americans will pick up the new 8GB Apple-Phone for $199 and 16GB for $299 after they sign on the dotted line for a two-year contract. That’s a much better deal than the Canadian rate offered by Rogers with a three-year contract and outrageous monthly data rates.

Canadians who find a lengthy contract unlivable might want to hold out for the no-strings version to hit the market in the US. Predictably, the new iPhone product cycle may look like this.

1. 2-year Contract iPhone 3G goes on sale
2. iPhone 3G is soon hacked and unlocked
3. AT&T begins selling higher-priced iPhone 3G sans contract.
4. Canadians can now bring home a hacked iPhone 3G and buy a SIM card from Rogers with a standard month-to-month plan.

The advantage to spending more money up-front and avoiding the carrier’s subsidy is simple. You can hold out for a better deal than Rogers is offering with its three-year iPhone 3G ball-and-chain deal. Who knows, maybe by next summer a brand new carrier will offer more interesting and flexible rates for your unlocked GSM cell phone.

The Canadian wireless airwaves are up for grabs in the big federal auction. We’re being assured that 40% of the new bands are reserved for new entrants into the wireless carrier biz. That could be good news if you’re sick of Rogers and by the comments we’ve been receiving it sounds like we are.

But you’ll have to choose one Rogers plan, Wayde-I-am. But beware, use too many of iPhones amenities, you’ll soon pay Rogers outrageous penalties. And those are as popular as Green Eggs and Ham.

Rogers unveiled iPhone 3G price plans and has decided Canadians are laden with excess wealth. Be warned before you take a look at the chart – try not to let the 1995 Krug bubbly issue uncontrollably from your nostrils as it may leave an unsightly stain upon your New & Lingwoods.

Between forthcoming competition in Canadian wireless airwaves and Apple’s insistence, many were fooled into thinking Rogers would provide customers an unlimited data plan. It turns out to have been Apple that cracked in those long, closed-door meetings between Canada’s only GSM wireless carrier and builders of the GSM Smartphone-of-ages.

Rogers budget plan is a $60 monthly fee that gives you 150 minutes and a scant 400MB of data. That’s higher than the fee paid by Americans to AT&T for unlimited data for the iPhone Classic. Your Canadian iPhone subsidy requires a 3-year contract where our south-of-the-border brethren get off with a 2-year beating.

The high-end plan runs for $115 per-month. That gives you 800 minutes and 2 GB of data. The $115 of course doesn’t include tax and System Access Fees and other bonus charges Rogers is so deft at hiding.

So, should you, would you on a boat? Should you, would you with a goat? You will not like Green Eggs and iPhone’s data plan.

While carriers of other nations will offer the new iPhone with two-year contracts or less, Rogers gives Canadians the longest contract in the world. In Japan, the Apple faithful will be granted the 8-GB iPhone for the equivalent of $215 US dollars with a two-year plan. O2 in the UK will sell the iPhone with a mere 18-month plan. Vodafone PLC and SingTel in Australia will give up the mobile phone without a contract at all.

The rest of the world offers iPhone plans equivalent or better than the announced US plan with AT&T. But not Rogers! Our homegrown telco is keeping the long tradition of screwing Canadians for mobile service alive and well. Up here in Canada we get a gargantuan 3-year contract. Two years is bad enough but three is a lifetime in mobile technology.

Apple’s first rendition of iPhone was only announced last year. Two years from now the mobile landscape will have completely changed. And you’ll still have another year on that outdated iPhone II. Nobody is interested in the iPhone today because they’re satisfied with last year’s anything. The average iPhone buyer is someone willing to pay a little extra for the latest-and-greatest. Rogers just wants to see how far they can take you.

After all, this is the land of System Access Fees. Ask your carrier what the SAF is and they’ll tell you it’s to cover their cost for doing business. There’s another name for that scam and it’s illegal in most economically developed nations.

Canadian Telcos admit it’s a form of bait-and-switch. Newspapers and TV advertise one price per-month of mobile service. Go to the store and you find out it’s another price. American consumers are protected from this practice by the Federal Trade Commission’s Initial Offer regulation under sec. 238.2. We may lament the American’s litigious ways up here but at least they won’t stand for being screwed. If AT&T tried to pull the SAF there’d be a class-action suit drawn up faster than you could spill your morning coffee.

If a Canadian car dealership decided to add an extra bill to your next auto purchase called a DIC fee (Dealer Incurred Cost), explaining it’s a bill for rent and maintenance on their facility… there would be hell to pay! But the same common sense doesn’t apply to the Canadian mobile industry.

Protected by the CRTC and complacent politicians, Canadians telcos have operated in a competition-free bubble for far too long. Maybe that’s why Rogers is one of Canada’s most profitable companies.

The 11 million figure comes to us from the Redhill Group for Home Media Magazine. That number will likely jump when the Transformers hits Blu-ray on September 2. Surprisingly, more Blu-ray discs have been sold through May 2008 than all of last year combined.

A recent study by ABI Research that interviewed 2,529 people across America concluded that Blu-ray wasn’t selling so well. But all of its numbers seem to tell a story of a new technological format that is about to break through.

According to the survey - 35% of those interviewed owned an HDTV, of those 10% already owned a Blu-ray player and an additional 9% said they were likely to buy a Blu-ray player within the year. They seem like tiny numbers but that’s not a failing format by any measure. Now we can back that up with an impressive 11 million Blu-ray discs sold so far.

Industry statistics say Blu-ray isn’t so red-hot yet. But the format is on its way to acceptance in the future. For now we have at least ten compelling reasons to turn to Blu-ray ASAP taken from a Blu-enlightened countdown on TechRadar.com.

The 50 Best Blu-ray Discs list includes several classics and soon-to-be classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the former category and 3:10 to Yuma that fits squarely in the latter. Say what you want about Spiderman 3, it had two tough acts to follow. But its Blu-ray presentation is among the sharpest yet seen and the TrueHD soundtrack is a credit to the format.

It was very good to see Planet Earth: The Complete Series squeak in at number 9. If you own a Blu-ray player and happen to live on the Planet Earth it behooves you to see this series. Take a couple of days to sit back and prepare to be blown away by the natural splendor caught in full 1080P HD. No Hollywood blockbuster can match the stunning brilliance of its breathtaking visuals.

Warner is the top home media producer outselling all the others in DVD and Blu-ray. In fact it’s so dominant in the home video market that its switch from HD DVD to Blu-ray was widely seen as the nail in the coffin.

Now the company is testing something new in an effort to improve sales of its Blu-ray discs by selling before DVD. So far the company is going to release the comedy Be Kind Rewind on Blu-ray on June 10th, that’s a full week before it hits DVD.

Will Warner’s effort create a spike in sales for the Jack Black movie co-starring Mos Def and Danny Glover? We’ll have to be kind and wait-and-see.

Fresh from defeating rival Toshiba in the battle for high-def discs, Sony unveiled its new Blu-ray players knowing these are the likely future of high definition movies. Both new players will perform 1080P/60 and 24 with ease and support a feature that Sony is calling "Bonus View".  Bonus View is just Sony’s new name for the picture-in-picture feature we’ve been expecting from Profile 1.0. Both players have an Ethernet port to support BD Live, the ability to download interactive features for certain upcoming Blu-ray movie discs.

Tired of Blu-ray players with only one or even two HDMI outputs? Both the BDP-S350 and S550 have three HDMI ports. They also have a USB port suitable for connecting portable USB storage device.

The BDP-S550 will include a 1GB storage device.

Both units can bitstream the new lossless audio formats including: 7.1 Dolby TrueHD, Dobly Digital Plus, DTS-HD High Resolution Audio and DTS-HD Master Audio.

If your receiver lacks HDMI 1.3 don’t worry the BDP-S550’s got your back!

The BDP-S550 can internally decode all the new high resolution audio formats named above and can output them through its 7.1 analog connections.

Both players will support x.v.Color -  yes that’s True Color, impressive! They’ll both be able to read BD-R/RE DVD+R/+RW, DVD-R/-RW, CD, CD-R/RW, and JPEG on DVD//CD recordable media.

The BDP-S350 is expected to launch this summer at $400 and the BDP-S550 will land the following fall at $500.

Song Remains the Same

Tuesday is the day we get a look at the latest releases on Blu-ray. Some we’ve seen at the theaters, some not, some are must see, some we’ll just forget came out.

The list for the week looks something like this:

2008 Tostitos Fiesta Bowl: Who knew Tostitos had a Fiesta Bowl? If you want to see a rerun of the Oklahoma Sooners getting beat by the West Virginia Mountaineers.  It’s worth noting for a Blu-ray it’s not presented in widescreen.

30 Days of Night: It’s cold in Feb. time to curl up and get the wits scared out of you by this graphic novel turned movie staring Josh Hartnet and some of the creepiest vampires you’ve seen.

The Beyonce Experience Live: Not my cup of tea but it has a PCM 5.1 audio track, sure to keep Beyonce fans rocking, if indeed that’s what they do.

Initial D: Live action adaptation of a Japanese comic book. Car races and humor - Japan style. It might be worth a look if you’re 15. But I think I’ll wait, maybe until the vampires on 30 Days bite me.

Justice League: The New Frontier Special Edition: I can’t get enough Bruce Tim animation. Count me in!

The Song Remains the Same: Zeppelin fans get a rare glimpse at a live concert with high-def video and Dolby TrueHD.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines: Completely forgettable Terminator flic. Except for the part with the crashing truck. And the other part with the crashing cars and trucks. Oh, yeah and the shooting parts. Other than that - what a bore!

To Kill A King: Period piece set in 1645 during English Civil War. Besides being a history geek -Tim Roth’s appearance tweaks my interest in this film.

The trouble is there is no such thing as future proof. But that doesn’t mean HDMI 1.3 should be ignored.

The new specification offers a single link bandwidth of 340MHz (10.2Gbps). Increased bandwidth between components makes it compatible with new audio/video standards.

Audio over HDMI 1.3

Dolby Digital True HD, Dolby Digital Plus, DTS-HD and DTS-HD Master Audio are the new audio codecs that require HDMI 1.3.

The one and only reason to go for HDMI 1.3 at this time is to bitstream the new audio codecs.

That means the disc player has to read a disc with a TrueHD soundtrack, and stream it to your A/V receiver before decoding it. The A/V receiver will then decode the audio and play it back to through the speakers. But that’s not the only way to enjoy the new codecs.

You don’t need the HDMI 1.3 specification on your A/V receiver if it has analog inputs and your disc player is capable of decoding the high resolution audio codec and sending out via its analog connections.

Video over HDMI 1.3

There is no video justification for HDMI 1.3, at least not yet. The only advance in video that requires HDMI 1.3 is Deep Color or x.v.Color. All versions of HDMI are compatible with 1080P resolution so you don’t need HDMI 1.3 just because you’ve got an HDTV capable of 1080P.

Deep Color is are color depths that go beyond the capability of human vision and are very demanding on bandwidth. A few displays today are compatible with deep color, but it’ll be a long time before there will be any regular consumer sources for x.v.Color.

In other words no movie discs use it and no player will send x.v.Color to your HDTV and the cable/satellite providers aren’t going to provide Deep Color for the foreseeable future.

For now, Deep Color isn’t quite ready for the mainstream consumer market and there is no compelling evidence that it ever will be. It should not be the impetus for an upgrade to HDMI 1.3.

So, the only tangible advantage offered by HDMI 1.3 today is the new lossless, high resolution audio formats available on HD discs. If you can play them back through a good quality speaker system - there is nothing like experiencing a movie with a DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack.