Costing the e-mail puppy dog

[rpm]

http://www.mybroadband.co.za/nephp/?m=show&id=365

"Both Vodacom and MTN currently offer BlackBerry, the push-technology e-mail device, in the South African market. Although each will no doubt argue the superiority of their offerings, what are the key price differences?"

 

[bwana]

I love my blackberry even though its an old one a mate donated to me - 5820. I only wanted to use it for messaging so I converted a pay-as-you-go to a 4u contract so I only pay the r159pm and can cancel it whenever I want.

I can see myself getting one of the newer ones when this clunker dies but until then I can live with the monotone screen and the lack of speaker/microphone - you need to use a headset with this model hence the reason I only use it for messaging.

I cant figure out why anyone would want to have one of the larger email accounts - 10mb is plenty for me as most is forwarded on from existing accounts - all my emails get forwarded to one gmail account as a backup anyway so it was a simple step to forward these on to the bb account. The bb will check any pop/imap email account but there's often a fairly long delay.

What nobody tells you is you can send free SMS type messages (called PINs) between BBs at no cost. Apparently they run independently and are a legacy from the BB early days. It can be useful if you dont want a record kept on a server or if you're having email problems.