[ZesePreodaNed]

I am awaiting for the new Blackberry 8800 to come out hopefully sometime in February/March 2007. At the moment, only Cingular will have it yet I read on cell forums that people will want to buy an "unlocked" version. Does this mean that you can use it with another provider? I currently use Sprint but they will not be getting the Blackberry 8800. So can I use this new Blackberry 8800 with Sprint, or will I have to switch to Cingular?

[dmitrynts]

Nope. you can't use a phone from cingular with sprint. The reason being cingular/t-mobile uses the GSM frequency's and sprint runs on the CDMA frequency's.

[ZesePreodaNed]

Ouch! Looks like I will have to change to Cingular. I don't mind except that I have this awesome Sprint plan where I pay only $20/month. It's so cheap and I'd hate to lose it.

Excuse my ignorance with Blackberrys, but is the Blackberry also a phone? Can I just get the Blackberry service by Cingular (it's advertised as $29.99/month)? I am assuming I also would need a Cingular voice plan with this?

[dmitrynts]

No clue what you can do with cingular plans as i'm with sprint also. You can get the blackberry's on sprint for 1, there are many other very good phones that sprint offers right now (and a few coming up) that are just as good as a blackberry. It is also a phone. It's a pda/phone all in one like the treo's and the 6700 (and soon to be replaced with the 6800). It uses it's own os and so it's harder to get programs for it unlike palm or windows based phones.

[Rememavotscam]

I am awaiting for the new Blackberry 8800 to come out hopefully sometime in February/March 2007. At the moment, only Cingular will have it yet I read on cell forums that people will want to buy an "unlocked" version. Does this mean that you can use it with another provider? I currently use Sprint but they will not be getting the Blackberry 8800. So can I use this new Blackberry 8800 with Sprint, or will I have to switch to Cingular?

Blackberry's are such crap, I don't understand why people use them. I mean, I go through phones like crazy, and I can say my Windows Mobile Cingular 3125 is the best I've ever had, might be nicer if it had a keyboard, but then again, I am trying to get my hands on a blackjack.

[casinoboneerer]

Blackberry's are such crap, I don't understand why people use them. I mean, I go through phones like crazy, and I can say my Windows Mobile Cingular 3125 is the best I've ever had, might be nicer if it had a keyboard, but then again, I am trying to get my hands on a blackjack.

Windows mobile is a piece of ****. It's slow, the phones that use it are generally terrible, with small hard buttons or flat indistinguishable buttons. The blackberry is a perfect workhorse OS. It's easy to use it, everything loads fast, and the phones work so well with the OS. It takes time to get used to them, but they are great phones.

What ever, just my 2c.

[dmitrynts]

Windows mobile is a piece of ****. It's slow, the phones that use it are generally terrible, with small hard buttons or flat indistinguishable buttons. The blackberry is a perfect workhorse OS. It's easy to use it, everything loads fast, and the phones work so well with the OS. It takes time to get used to them, but they are great phones.

What ever, just my 2c.

And what phones have you tried? the ones i've tried were very nice.

[Rememavotscam]

Windows mobile is a piece of ****. It's slow, the phones that use it are generally terrible, with small hard buttons or flat indistinguishable buttons. The blackberry is a perfect workhorse OS. It's easy to use it, everything loads fast, and the phones work so well with the OS. It takes time to get used to them, but they are great phones.

What ever, just my 2c.

Slow? compared to what? The WM 5.0 devices I have used kick the crap out of any palm device I have used. I mean, the old 2003 devices were a bit on the slow side, but that OS was crap.

Yeah, blackberry is pretty good from the user's prospective, but for sysadmin's it's a NIGHTMARE. Lock down your network, but some dick in a higher level wants you to set up a blackberry server, oops big hole in your security, because of how easy it is for your blackberry to get a virus.

And what does RIM say about it? "If you set it up right it isn't a problem", yeah, if you set it up "right" it's totally useless. If the blackberry market wasn't so big, Cingular would have dropped support for them, and as is, at the corporate level there is a big push to get people to switch to WM for security reasons.

[nd90t3sf]

Slow? compared to what? The WM 5.0 devices I have used kick the crap out of any palm device I have used. I mean, the old 2003 devices were a bit on the slow side, but that OS was crap.

Yeah, blackberry is pretty good from the user's prospective, but for sysadmin's it's a NIGHTMARE. Lock down your network, but some dick in a higher level wants you to set up a blackberry server, oops big hole in your security, because of how easy it is for your blackberry to get a virus.

And what does RIM say about it? "If you set it up right it isn't a problem", yeah, if you set it up "right" it's totally useless. If the blackberry market wasn't so big, Cingular would have dropped support for them, and as is, at the corporate level there is a big push to get people to switch to WM for security reasons.

Sorry - but I'm afraid you have been misinformed with regards Blackberry.
I am an IT Manager here in the UK for a quite large firm.
I run a WIndows AD network, one that I built myself from the ground up some 6+ years ago.
We have a Blackberry Enterprise Server that connects to our current Exchange 2003 Servers to distribute mail to our sales, marketting and managers who carry Blackberry devices.
I can tell you categorically that there are no security risks in the system we have set up.
As for being a Sys Admin's nightmare - the Blackberry server is far from it.
In fact of all the various systems we run the Blackberry system is the one that requires the least amount of work.
We watch for patches for the Windows server it sits on of course and as RIM release fixes and patches we apply them.
However the server is reliable and the system never goes wrong - we never need to do any work on it.

The Blackberry system is a complete push system, there is no need for the devices to log into anything and pull e-mail.
This in itself makes things a lot more secure as the mail messages arrive "in house" and are then pushed out to the device.
When you have a device, something running WM5 for example, the device needs to come in to collect it's mail and this is a major security risk in itself.

Most of my systems are Windows based, however the Blackberry system was the one we decided upon because of it's ease of use, reliability and security and if we were rolling it all out again today we'd make the same choice again.
Any system is only as secure as you make it - it's well known that Windows & Linux are both as secure as one another for example, but only when configured correctly.
However with Blackberry because of the push system it is more secure than any system that requires remote access to your network/systems to collect e-mail.

[Rememavotscam]

When you have a device, something running WM5 for example, the device needs to come in to collect it's mail and this is a major security risk in itself.

Except that now WM 5 can do push from exchange.

However with Blackberry because of the push system it is more secure than any system that requires remote access to your network/systems to collect e-mail.

Except that it's not, because blackberry has much more access to the network whereas WM only communicates through standard web protocol, Blackberry acts like any other computer on the network, with full access to everything. Which is the root cause to the problem's in the link I posted.

http://www.cfo.com/article.cfm/72693...todayinfinance

Believe me, I know about the blackberry virus problem. I can't even tell you how long my dad spent trying to find a solution to the virus problem. He set up a test server at Cingular, infected some blackberries, and then went crazy with them all over the test network. Finally had to give up not able to find a solution short of hard reseting the blackberries.