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**** All,
I have a unlocked storm. I will be flying to Munich, or Frankfurt tomorrow. I would like to know if I can buy a no strings attached sim card, with data that will allow me to use BBM.
I looked a vodaphone, but they do not have BlackBerry phones? Will I still be albe to connect to BBM?
Can someone point me in the right direction?
I will have to train, or fly from Germany to Croatia and would like to use my phone.
Thanks in advance
csubi
With your travel plans through at least 4 countries you are probably wasting your time looking for a local SIM. My advice (based on a lot of short duration international travel) is to setup the best available roaming plan on your home provider before you leave, and accept the charges. Prepay data with BB compatibility is still difficult to find in Europe, so even if you find a good local deal the home plan gives you a fallback anyway.
In reality the data usage from BBM or email is pretty low if you use it responsibly. The killers for cost (in order of increasing extortion) are email attachments, web browsing, and particularly streaming data or voice calls - with the added problem of letting others know the phone # of a temporary SIM. If you are spending only a few days in country it doesn't pay to get a local SIM - you will waste too much time buying and setting up, and you probabaly won't use all your purchased airtime within a day or two.
I was actually considering whether to get a global SIM card for future european travel (2+ wks) in August.
I'm glad I found this topic because I basically came to the same conclusion - sure, it may cost a bit more with your carrier but you don't have to go through any hassles of a foreign SIM and a new phone number (which is long distance for most to call you).
And yes you have to be very conservative. Call only if you would consider it 'urgent', change your filters so you only get messages addressed to you (vs. in a mail group), and limit data usage. I can be a bandwidth wh0r3 once in a while so it will be hard not to look at websites every 10 minutes. Just means I get to focus more on having a great vacation!