Buying a Blackberry from Orange
Just been in the Orange shop on Cheapside here in the City of London. Hetty, my colleague, needs a Blackberry again. For a while she really didn’t need one but we agreed it was time she got connected to her email more regularly — the demands of business are changing.
So we popped into the Orange store. I thought I’d try and give them a bit of business. You know, spread the lovin’ around. I also reasoned that buying a secondary Blackberry on my account won’t save me anything. T-Mobile will simply charge me double. There are no efficiencies gained. Ergo why stay loyal? A good opportunity to check out Orange too, I reckoned.
‘Do you do the 8700 Blackberry?’ I asked the guy in store. He confirmed, yes.
‘How much?’ I asked.
He suggested that if we took a £35/month price plan, the Blackberry would be free. Cool. You also get unlimited landline calls with that plan. Very smart. They’ve got some good offers like this.
‘AAAAND you need the £16/month data plan option,’ the guy said.
WOAH!!!!! Wait a moment! Over 50 quid a month for a Blackberry?
‘What’s your cheapest price plan?’ I asked.
‘19 quid a month,’ he said, rather sheepishly, knowing I was just about to say, ‘and is that PLUS the 16 quid a month Blackberry fee?’
‘So it’s over 30 quid a month, minimum and the device is 180 quid?’ I summarised.
‘Er, yeah,’ said the poor guy.
‘But it’s 18 quid a month for 1,000 off peak minutes AND Blackberry service on T-Mobile?’ I respond.
‘Er, yeah,’ he said. Resigned.
I thanked them and walked out. I suppose the Blackberry deal could be a good’un if you were looking for a price plan AND the Blackberry service. But all we need is the device and the instant email. Shame. We’ll get it from T-Mobile.
I don’t use my BlackBerry for voice calls (actually, on very rare occasions when I don’t want to carry multiple devices but do want my e-mail it’ll be my main phone, but since I own a telco I just use our callback line to make outbound calls) so I pay Vodafone the princely sum of £18.50 a month… I think that includes 5 or 6mb of data transfer but I can’t remember as I’ve never gone over it.
They did forget to include this allowance when I first signed up though so keep an eye on those bills!
Posted by Dan Lane on October 16th, 2006 at 7:57 pm.wow! dont its going to cost to much. Try to get a company deal from T-mobile promos are comming out and data rates are better.
htpp://www.blackberryfreeware.com
Posted by James Smithon on October 17th, 2006 at 7:48 am.T-mobile still makes the most sense. Even if you went for the cheapest pricing plan with any of the other operators, T-mobile still offers a sizeable email account at 25mb which can trade any amount of data. All the others are around 5-6mb for your email account. With this capacity you’d spend all day having to clear the account rather than use it efficiently.
The only downside of the T-mobile account is its web email functionality - basic at best, and it often doesn’t render properly leaving the original email and its reply overlapping so you can’t work out what’s been said. Still, all in all t-mobile still wipes the board in terms of pricing and capacity for the SOHO/SME user.
Posted by Ed on October 17th, 2006 at 9:35 am.