[foges]

Im a blackberry newbie and just got my first bill, which came to 35USD (3.5mb) for just using bb internet services (1 - not very active email account, and BBMing very rarely). I thought that was rather expensive, especially seeing as i have 250mb of normal internet surfing included in my contract. for this last week i decided to disable my email account (plus i havnt recieved any BBM's) and i found out that on average i was charged 0.5USD per day, so thats app. 15USD per month (without using any BB service!!!). Does this make any sense to you guys?

If this makes sense to you, do you know of any way to get my curve to not connet to the BB servers the whole time?

[joe003]

Welcome to CB!

I have sprints all you can eat plan (simply everything plan). It has unlimited minutes, data, messaging, everything the BB does is included. I'd explore that kind of option with your carrier. It gives me peace of mind, knowing that my bill every month will always be the same regardless of how much I use my phone, which is a lot!!!

Enjoy the addiction

[Branta]

Im a blackberry newbie and just got my first bill, which came to 35USD (3.5mb) for just using bb internet services (1 - not very active email account, and BBMing very rarely). I thought that was rather expensive, especially seeing as i have 250mb of normal internet surfing included in my contract. for this last week i decided to disable my email account (plus i havnt recieved any BBM's) and i found out that on average i was charged 0.5USD per day, so thats app. 15USD per month (without using any BB service!!!). Does this make any sense to you guys?

If this makes sense to you, do you know of any way to get my curve to not connet to the BB servers the whole time?

Something is wrong. Your connections to RIM for BBM, email, and most browsing are normally part of your bundled BB data package and should not cost extra - provided you don't go mad with websites. The extra charge suggests two possible problems
(a) your BB data package is not correctly setup on your account, maybe set as iPhone data instead - get your provider to check what is provisioned.
(b) you were browsing websites NOT through the BB data bundle and RIM interface.

[foges]

I live in switzerland and we dont have any of those unlimited plans. What we do have is 250MB data plan (just normal http) or 5MB blackberry data for ~20USD. If you dont go with the blackberry data plan for 20$, then each MB through the BB servers costs 10$.

I have the 250MB plan, because i really didnt think that my emails would account for much more than 1MB (clearly not the case! But i dont really understand why). and with 250MB i can surf using the BB Browser.

The other thing is that it seems whenever i use applications (eg. opera mini, gmail, viigo, etc...) my blackberry data plan is used (expensive) instead of my normal data plan (cheap)

So what i really want is a way of being able to controll exactly what applications can access the blackberry servers

[Branta]

What you are saying is you got billed extra at penalty rates for using Blackberry data on a non-Blackberry plan. Sounds fair to me if you knew what you were doing when you agreed the contract.

If you don't want to use BB data then disable the data services. We can't tell you exactly how to do this until we know what device you're using, but as an example you might find you have several browser options available - and only one of them will be generic http which bills to your web plan. The BB browser almost certainly counts as BB plan data. Also forget about using Blackberry email, BBM, and any net enabled third party applications like viigo. You'll have to read email through a web browser interface to the mail server. Basically you got yourself a very pretty phone but can't use most of its features.

I suspect you might get a better overall deal if you switched to the proper BB data plan. It sounds rather like all your activity is done with it anyway, and you might find very little has been allocated against your generic 250MB package - its all billed as off-contract Blackberry.

[foges]

Im using the blackberry curve 8310

The blackberry data plans we have include 5mb for 20$, and with 5mb and surfing i wont get very far. And on the website of my provider it is stated that 1mb = app 500 emails (and there is no way that i recieved 500 emails last month, more probably 100-150). So me being gullable i guess believed that i wouldnt get more than 1mb or so in emails and BBM.

I also expected that if i didnt recieve any BBM's or emails, then my phone would not connect to the BB servers. This is clearly not true and i therefore wanted to be able to check what applications access the BB servers.

Eg. i was in germany (bordering country) last weekend for app 8hrs, didnt have my email service activated and recieved no BBM's. My bb connected to the servers 9 times, each time 10kb.