8820 found on Orange site

[Robbie]

If you go to the Orange site that ends in .fr (the French cell website) you will see a BB 8820. It has GPS and Wi Fi so the phone does exist somewhere in the World.
Now if the ATT stores would stock them we would be all set.
As an FYI, I'm starting to think Wi Fi may not be all that it's cut out to be. Some say free calls when in Europe but I highly doubt that.
Would love to hear from someone who thinks Wi Fi will be worth the wait.

[Father Fil]

I can confirm that the phone does exist in the UK - I have it.

The WiFi aspect is pretty cool - haven't tested out the call side of it yet but if I have a WiFi signal and no mobile signal (Orange) I still get emails from my server so I imagine there must be some special routing method going on. Otherwise I have no way of explaining how I get emails when I have no signal. It also makes browsing so much quicker when there is WiFi availability.

In fact, the only think bad about it is that if you setup a wifi profile incorrectly you can't edit it - you have to remove and re-add. (Edit functionality is available but it doesn't see to work in the case of selecting wi-fi network type)

[Berryman]

Orange is a subsidairy of France Telecom, they also own Mobistar, the number two carrier in my (adopted) home country, Belgium. The Blackberry 8820 is for sale right now at EUR412 - it's illegal in Belgium to sell subsidized devices at an artificially low cost.

Even this week, our firm's Mobistar rep. confirmed that the BlackBerry 8820 lacked Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) support, commonly used to link with a corporate IP PBX or messaging server. Additionally, that Mobistar had chosen for the time being not to support what the 8820 can offer support for, the Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) IP telephony protocol. UMA would permit the 8820 or any dual-mode wi-fi/cellular handset to seamlessly link to the users home network that in turn links back to a mobile carrier’s network, or indeed from the same carrier's hotspot. If the carrier supports UMA, then these call from the 8820 over the wi-fi network would be free.

Wi-fi suport is a plus, but for me at least, until free hostspots really become widespread, and the ones you locate do not require that you handover obscene amounts of your hard earned cash whilst crawling though the login procedures, then wi-fi support is a feature I can live without.

For me the most important feature that will eventually be supported by future Blackberrys is connectivity via HSDPA.