[LionAR10]

First off, my tour is everything I wanted. Awesome. Except for battery life.

I'm on Sprint and use BES in the States. Worked great with my Curve, and now works fine with my new Tour after Sprint somehow went BES, BIS, BES with my account. Support calls fixed it.

However, I'm on the road a lot ... and I use sims from where ever I'm at (and our phone system just forwards my calls to the local cell #). But I've had trouble with buying prepaid sims with Blackberry service. I use prepaids 'cause I'm only in one spot a few weeks at a time and the local sims are usually a pretty good deal over getting hosed by extensive roaming fees.

So I've been working with my Tour to try and preserve functionality in a GSM data only environment without having to do a lot of changeover work. I've run into a few problems...

First off, I took the advice of the Blackberry-on-Boost (Boostberry, eg http://forums.crackberry.com/f137/bo...rounds-177019/ ) folks who run without BIS/BES using a straight data connection. What's needed is replacements for the software that are TCP sockets based, not BIS or BES/MDS ones. Ok, so these days there's a lot of those that just work direct. Like Beejive, Opera, tiggitmail, Viigo, Podtrapper, etc .. they all should work straight sockets.

Using a TMO sim (here at home) with only data on it I found right away nothing worked. I pulled in the APN for TMO, but still nothing worked. I don't expect email/BBM/browser to work, but I went to work on my sockets-aware programs. Nothing.

I think BES had to be poked. It seemed that the IT Policy required everything to go through BES. So I needed to set it to be split-pipe. So I changed that in BES and also allowed external connections. Pushed new IT Policy.

Reboot Sprint, get new IT Policy and Servicebooks.

Go back to TMO. Still nothing.

Read more and found that in cases where MDS is active on BES it's bad mojo for anything you've got installed:

Unfortunately, the default BlackBerry security policy is to expressly forbid so-called "split pipe connections" (for details, refer to the following RIM document: Application Security for Java-based BlackBerry Handhelds). Third-party applications are permanently restricted to the first connection mode attempted (e.g. BES/MDS or WAP), regardless if the attempt was successful or not. Unfortunately, the only workaround is to reinstall the OS before trying a different connection mode.

I've found this statement in several places (this is from StockBoss Frequenly Asked Questions) and the only variation is Reinstall the OS or Reinstall the app.

All of my stuff, of course, is installed with full BES/MDS active. Ok, so I shut down MDS, forbid it in the IP Policy, pushed new IT Policy and Servicebooks (after like 80 reboots). None of my applications worked on either Sprint (BES) or TMO (GSM data). The core RIM ones did, but 3rd party .. toast.

I reinstalled a few, trying out the advice I found for flagged applications for MDS. Sure enough, I would uninstall, reinstall, and they'd work. Both sides.

You can see at this point with 5 min reboots, this isn't an easy task to get this far. The question that I have is: Is there anything else I should be doing, or a better way of handling this so that the transition from on-BES to off-BES goes well for me?

And to those people who say "Just get BES service from your provider!": Thank you for your advice. BES/BIS is not available from all carriers and not available to all prepaid/no contract plans. GSM data, even in the worst of countries I visit, is available as prepaid or no contract.

Thanks for any thoughts you might have.