Blackberry is one of the phones which consistently delivers very good voice quality and I was hooked onto this particular aspect of RIM devices when I first got my perl flip for Tmobile last year. Things went to downhill on that silly Perl Flip device fairly soon. Automatic reboots, occasional lock-ups become daily routine. Long painful story was shortened by 3 replacements and eventually a new Blackberry 8520 came as final replacement from Tmobile- class act!
Now, I jumped into googling about running my phone off the $10 web2go plan instead of $30 BIS data plan. The morale of the story I found over my hours of search is- anything with RIM involved (such as, BB messenger/BB maps/BB weather/BB App world) will refuse to work without a blackberry data plan. However, most of the other functionalities can work just fine with a regular data plan; with some tweak.
When my 8520 was shipped to me, it was not showing up as a RIM device at T-mobile.com account. So, I had no problem to choose a Samsung model with internet capabilities at T-mobile.com as my phone and successfully add $10 web2go plan to my account. In my blackberry, under settings, I went to advanced settings and under TCP/IP set my APN as internet2.voicestream.com. Now everything works fine- I used Opera mini 5 beta 2 and web browsing is smooth.
However, I really needed couple of apps from BB appworld. One is Ka-glom and another is Callblocker pro. So I had to chat with TMO rep to get BIS instead of web2go plan. I installed BB app world, installed the necessary apps and cancell my BIS plan and select a Samsung phone to add web2go plan into my account. Surprise! surprise- in a wrong sense. Nothing is working anymore. The phone can not access anything that requires data plan. So I went back to the settings and under advanced options I looked at host routing table aka HRT. All HRT entries has one thing in common, under APN it is using blackberry.net. I believe, once you have your blackberry provisioned with BIS, it won't work with a regular data plan just because of the altered HRT. In a non-provisioned BB, HRT stays blank. So I picked up a blank SIM card for TMo and rebooted my 8520 with it. Voila- HRT table is now blank. Removed the SIM card, rebooted my 8520 with original SIM card and HRT stays unaffected. So now, I have a data enabled blackberry and I do not have to pay 30 dollars per month for accessing my gmail app, google maps and unlimited browsing.
