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Low cost Blackberry cell phone
Added: (Tue May 06 2008)
Had an interesting experience recently upgrading mobile phones and adding a second mobile line! In order to pick between services, you need to decide what is important:
• Do you want everything to the desktop on the phone as you get with Blackberry?
• Do you just want the critical messages?
• Do you just want the headers?
• Do you just want messages from certain people?
Do you just want key points? Here are a few pointers:
1) Read the fine print very carefully! Unlimited SMS or text messaging does not mean infinite! With some carriers, it means monthly 100 SMS, others 500 SMS and others 2500 SMS. If you pick 100 SMS for $5/month, then every other one after that may cost 0 to 15 cents! Thus, 100 more may cost nothing or $15; 200-more $30 and 300-more $40 and so on!
2) Not all carrier plans are created equal! Many carriers are trying to get as many subscribers onboard as possible. As such, they are giving you the hardware free - Blackberry, Nokia phone, you name it (!) - as long as you subscribe to a 3 year service plan that is $30 for voice and $15 for ‘unlimited’ Email/Texting. That amounts to $540 a year for 3 years or $1620 lock in contract that if broken has to be paid out! There may be nothing wrong with this if you plan to love your carrier enough to not want to switch for 3 yrs! Your other choice is to go for no contract but pay the $300 to $600 for the phone and the higher monthly fees!
3) So, the bottom line is be very aware of what plan you sign up to and make sure you review your bill occasionally as you never know when that ‘unlimited’ email or text plan becomes very limited!
In addition, I am often asked how someone can get enterprise email on a mobile phone. There are a number of ways to do this. You could buy a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) and Blackberries for everyone. This may be a bit expensive at $200 plus/device, a $70/month service and the price of the BES. Other users actually forward their enterprise email to personal accounts like Gmail, Yahoo!, etc. This is a very bad idea and defeats the whole purpose of enterprise security and the compliance efforts of your CIO.
The other option is to look for a mobile email enterprise server for mobile phones, which would turn most common mobile phones into a low cost Blackberry. A number of products could fit this bill. Amika Mobile is one such company whose products convert the ubiquitous SMS-enabled mobile device into a low cost Blackberry cell phone by delivering the essential message from the desktop email into a simple SMS message designed to ideally fit the wireless micro screen.