Needs some advice from Blackberry users.

[TheForce]

Beginning this week, My wife started with a new company. This company requires its employees to use a Blackberry as they use the Blackberry e-mail and calendar services. In the past she has been using a Treo 700W with the windows Exchange server for e-mail and it has worked well to her needs. Our service is Verizon.

Verizon has Blackberry PDA phones. In particular a model 8830 that seems to meet her needs for work. Other services like ATT have better BlacKberry phones and even sweeter prices than Verizon but the service costs about the same and you get less coverage. (I've been out with some of the people who use BB on ATT and they often suffer connection problems as well as dropped calls.)

I'm pretty ignorant on Blackberry e-mail services and needs to get up to speed. I asked her to get with the company's IT rep and get a written list of requirements as well as their recommendation as what they think would work best. I also asked her to find out what her boss uses. I also want to learn what the options. pros and cons of the different plans and phones are, as compared to what we are familiar with. Hopefully you all can offer that assistance.

Problem- I have her Treo under contract with Verizon so switching to ATT is less desirable than moving her plan on Verizon to one that includes Blackberry services. I would prefer to remain on Verizon unless they just don't do Blackberry very well or it is very expensive compared to others, like ATT.

 

[gbjbany]

Don, im afraid i may not be mch help but here's my offering !
I have att service with an 8700. I contacted my IT group and they just talked me through the setup, took about 5 mins. We use oulook as our email client and it seems to work very well.
Key things i like.
1. I dont need to power up my pc and all that stuff to see calender meeting notices especially just before i go to bed to see if i need to get up for an early am call the next day - such a stress reliever.
2. The keyboard takes a while to get used to, but it's quite useful once you get used to the shortcuts.
3. I have had no issues with connections yet, i travel from Sac to San fran and to Oregon once a month, only had lack of service once
4. i can lookup profile info for anybody at my company through the lookup service, very handy if trying to contact them, you can then add to your contacts if you like.
Other than that a few small gripes.
1. I have my personal email account also being received, and it merges the info in the inbox. So sometimes personal mails get lost.
2. It doesnt seem to keep up with the read unread count on my inbox on the outlook servers, which is how i manage my inbox. Not sure why i have tried various things, i think it's because i have client side rules that archive mail to my offline folders.
3. I ordered the Internaltional blackberry data service and it's quite expensive, but i wasnt told i need to keep it for 12 months, and i explained I only needed it for a 2 weeks a year, but i guess that could be my fault.
4. The other thing my IT managed service wont let me do is download any additional apps, so i cant add mapquest or other internet client apps.
5. The browser doesnt support many of the more visual sites very well, they ask me to upgrade my browser.

That's it for now, hope it was of some use.

 

[VinceT3]

my company uses verizon & bb and I haven't heard any issues from them.. I use my own windows mobile phone for work so I haven't expreienced it first hand..

 

[TheForce]

Thanks, guys. Every bit of information helps. I'm glad I won't have to get used to it. It seems too restrictive for my needs. Hopefiully my wife will find it adequate for her work. She's already talking about keeping the Treo active and having the BB for just work. As we have to pay for this, I'm not sure that makes sense.

 

[sidekick]

I use an 8830 for my work an personal email accounts and also my work calendar. It works great! Also the Blackberry has an awesome GPS that works better than my Garmin. I use it all the time. I have a great site for free ringtones if you ever need that too. I really like my Blackberry. I have different alert sounds for each of my 5 email accts and the calendar too. It's a great system. You don't need to use Blackberry's email service with the unit; I sure don't. Also when I'm on the train, I sync to my laptop through the Blackberry to use the internet. It's quite fast.

 

[TheForce]

Sidekick- Sounds great. My wife plans to spend some time with a Verizon rfep at CES to learn all about it. I suggested the 8830. She normally only uses 600 minutes of talk time a month so I wonder what plan she would need to use it with her company's system. that is, what other services do we need besides the unlimited data plan. Are there also Blackberry fees on top of that?

 

[bderouen]

Hi Don!
I'm a die hard Verizozn user and i too use a Blackberry. I used to have a 700W as well, but not being on an Enterprise Server, I used Verizon's Wireless Synch. I wasn't too wild about it only because it synched every 15 minutes, as opposed to the push that the Blackberries do. Now that I'm on a Blackberry, I'm thrilled with it. it was not that big of a switch to me to go to a Blackberry.

I too have the 8830 and overall, I like it. The only problem with it is the keys are awfully close together. It's easy to do miskeys when learning to do the thumb typing. That may be something you want to look at. I do like the phone...that's the one negative I have with it.

There are really no extra fees past the unlimited Data and voice combo plans. Make sure you check out VZWs packages, as they have voice/data combo packs that are pretty good deals. There are other extras you may want....such as Verizon' GPS service (I can't remember what they call it, but it's $15 more a month. Not worth it for me), but for normal use, that's plenty.

As you and her are getting used to the blackberry, you may want to check out another forum site I frequent - BlackBerryForums.com : Your Number One BlackBerry Community.

hope this helps
Bruce