** Question/Advice for all BB Experts **
 

I'm looking forward to the 8320 curve that features wi-fi being offered by Tmobile however i'm an AT&T subscriber. I've never had a BB before but I really like the 8320 because of it's full keyboard. Really, I don't have a need for receiving corporate email but I would like to receive on occasion my personal emails from yahoo/hotmail/ and gmail. I would also want to be able to use the Instant message services with yahoo/msn.

My question to all of you is if I am able to obtain an unlocked phone with wifi and use it with AT&T, will it be possible to use the wifi to receive my emails seamlessly as it was intended by blackberry? I am trying to avoid paying the blackberry data package. Right now I pay about $50 a month for my mobile phone service and want to keep it that way.

I figure with wifi, i can enjoy the features of email, instant message chat via WIFI if I find a hotspot or through my own home wireless interenet connection.

Can you guys confirm this? Sorry for the lenghty post. Your answers are appreciated!

- Mario in Miami:bb:

I would like to know this as well.

You need the blackberry data plan to get email/use the internet. no way around it

Do you mind me asking how you know this? It's just I've heard different things from people, for example Mark_Venture got his 8320 to have web access over wifi without a sim card in- implying you don't need a data plan.

Can anyone confirm whether you *need* a dataplan - i.e. has anyone been able to access the web with the 8320 wifi *with* a sim card in but *without* a data plan?

Thanks :)

You can most likely use WiFi to surf the web. However, to get push email, you will have to have the BB dataplan. Email is tied to the BB PIN so RIM knows where to push the email. Also, when you are out of WiFi range, you will need the B dataplan to surf.

I don't have a Curve so I am not the expert, plus WiFi is still new to the BB. We really won't know until it gets inthe hands of users and we can start playing with it.

I think the carriers will hava a lot to do with this. AT&T seems a bit draconian in their control of their customers.

If you can enable wi-fi without a dataplan (that's the Q) I assume you can view a yahoo/gmail account. I don't think you can IM through a client without a data plan on a BB.

I have no experience or expertise but think it's logical that ATT and others have figured out that people want wifi to avoid plan charges. My guess is that what you'll ultimately be able to do with it is very limited.

So far as I'm aware 88xx and 83xx are soon available with wifi on ATT.

I'm not sure about the other email providers, but GMail is very well integrated with BIS. I host a few side domains with GHS and can verify that eMail almost hits my BB faster than it does the gmail web interface, and those are on private domains, not *@gmail.com! The filters and spam traps in google also provide excellent control over what actually lands on the BB, and in conjunction with the filters in BIS (very very simple filtering, not really that good), provide me with much of the functionality of BES without all the headaches, management overhead and expense.

The down side? Yeah, the google giant always looking over your shoulder and you don't have the enterprise-grade functionality of BES.

The answer is yes you can use WIFI and connect to the internet without a data packege.

lol, three months late, but hey, you are so right.