I plan on taking my Blackberry 8830to Europe next week - I will be in France, Switzerland, Austria and Italy - and I am on Bell Mobility here in Canada.

I have checked and the cost for long distance to call home from Europe (all four countries) is $1.99/minute (!!!). I only plan on calling home a few times, but I would like to be in contact in case of emergency.

My question is should I buy a SIM card in France to use in each country or just continue calling using the Bell Mobility plan? I'll be away for two weeks.

This article says Bell Mobility is a CDMA carrier, which means you probably have a CDMA phone:

http://www.canadiancontent.net/mobile/bell_mobility/

Has that changed? Because CDMA doesn't work in Europe. Only GSM does.

No, Bell Mobility is 100% CDMA. (At least 2 weeks ago it was).

According to this website, the Blackberry 8830 is the first CDMA smartphone capable of roaming globally on GSM/GPRS networks.

http://www.blackberry8800series.com/8830/

Making sure your plan with Bell Mobility covers international roaming. Personally, I wouldn't worry about the rate. If there's an emergency, you can buy a calling card and use a land-line phone for longer conversations. I tend to use my Blackberry for email contact with the family and hardly ever call home.

I checked with Bell Mobility and I am able to call and receive calls in Europe using my GSM/CDMA Blackberry, but the charges will be at the rate that the local provider charges PLUS long-distance charges. Therefore, I think that I will use it only for emergency and to email, then I will buy long-distance calling cards to call home.

Sounds cool!!! If they just could offer a
CDMA,CDMA2000,WCDMA(UMTS),GSM(+GPRS), 850, 900, 1800, 1900, 2100, analogue low cost phone with all the features.

It can't be that difficult, can it? I know, this will be standard some day in the not too distant future, but how long do I have to wait??

I believe you have what is called the "world phone" by Verizon in the US. It does indeed use CDMA but is also capable of accepting a SIM for use in Europe.
For our recent trip I went with www.callineurope.com and was quite pleased. They were very helpful on the phone when I was researching and deciding - you might contact them to see if it would work for you.

You have a worldphone, but it may need to be "unlocked" to use a SIM card with it. That would depend on your carrier's rules.

If it needs to be unlocked, you should be able to get the codes from Bell to unlock the phone and use it with a French SIM card. The 8830 can be used as a GSM phone with the SIM card.

I have the same phone and was able to get the unlock codes from Verizon so that when I go overseas I can use a local SIM card. The per minute charge is much lower and generally incoming calls are free.

Good luck!

Bridget

Holy cr@p, how could I forget an important detail like that? Thanks for adding that, Bridget.

timsmom

I am curious to hear how your Blackberry worked out for Italy. Did you use it for its GPS /mapping capabilities and if so were there any pitfalls ? Did you use a European sim card and what kind of rates did you find ?

We are examining the CallInEurope (CIE) plan as an option to using Telus roaming.

Any feedback would be welcome

I just discovered this today: evidently there's a leak in T-Mobile's European server that benefits Blackberry users. T-Mo's spiel says:

<b>BlackBerry Unlimited International E-mail for only $19.99/month is the service to add if you travel worldwide. As long as you have a provider that offers GPRS Internet service, you’ll be able to send and receive e-mails from country to country.</b>

Here's the kicker: using this account for <u>internet data</u> (either on the BB or a tethered laptop) doesn't incur any international data charges. I have the same experience with my $5.99 T-MobileWeb account - it works all over Europe at no additional charge - as long as the handset is registered on a T-Mo cell site.