[magicasian]

I have an iphone right now, but I'm also a blackberry fan. I like some things about iphone, but can't stand the email which is important for me. So I'm about 73% sure I'll be getting a blackberry but there are a few things I'm not sure about.

1. I'm not a business user, but I use an exchange server since my college has that. Therefore I wanted to make sure that being on BIS not BES, my exchange server can still sync contacts OTA (and obviously it can push email still)...this is possible?

2. curve vs bold. I like that the curve is small and available right now, but I like that the bold will have 3g and wifi. I don't like that it's larger. I also don't care for the leather back? Does anyone have any general advice about the devices, or know if the bold's plan will cost a lot more than the normal bb data since it's 3G?

3. This may be more specifically for ATT, but I'll be out of the country for about 5 months, does anyone know if I can suspend my data plan? This might be reason to wait until I get back to switch since the iphone data is less.

Thanks for any help guys. Hopefully I'll be on the forum as an actual blackberry user in the near future.

ps on iphone I have 3 mail accounts. Exchange, imap gmail, and a conventional pop/smtp comcast account. With the last one, I can not send emails if I'm not on my home wifi. I don't really know why, but does BIS let blackberry users send emails from this type of account over EDGE anywhere? Thanks again.

[mattkrass]

-snip-
1. I'm not a business user, but I use an exchange server since my college has that. Therefore I wanted to make sure that being on BIS not BES, my exchange server can still sync contacts OTA (and obviously it can push email still)...this is possible?
-snip-
ps on iphone I have 3 mail accounts. Exchange, imap gmail, and a conventional pop/smtp comcast account. With the last one, I can not send emails if I'm not on my home wifi. I don't really know why, but does BIS let blackberry users send emails from this type of account over EDGE anywhere? Thanks again.

I am pretty sure that the BIS plan does not allow for OTA contact syncing, however this originally bothered me as well but I find that remembering to hook it up to the laptop, which is running Outlook 2007 on my schools exchange server, every so often isn't as annoying as I thought and works plenty fine for me.

As far as the Comcast email goes I believe they lock their SMTP servers to only accept connections from their internal network, which your home connection is one, hence why wifi works. The BlackBerry would suffer the same problem unless RIM has some kind of deal to let their BIS servers access Comcasts SMTP servers, but I have not heard of any such a situation.

Hope I helped somewhat.
Matt

[magicasian]

thanks that did help a lot