[foges]

I live in switzerland and a friend of mine asked me what would be the best (optimisng price and performance) option for a phone with push mail. My first instinct was the e71 (what im currently using) because I can use a normal data plan which is much much cheaper than the blackberry data plan, he doesnt have massive amounts of emails.

Now the thing is, he is abroad a lot, so i need to know: what phone uses less data connection while abroad (for push mail, currently using SEVEN on my Phone)?

[Tinyk]

I would have to say the blackberry as everything data wise is compressed.

I had the e71 and currently have the bold, on a trip to amsterdam with the E71 I would normally use 6-8meg just reading e-mails (using imap though) this last time i took my bold and used less than 1 meg with e-mails / a little browsing and BB messenger which is pretty kewl as it saved me a fortune over using texts with the misses all weekend.

[mikman]

Swisscom has some special corporate data plans that they don't know about themselves. They're called Blackberry Professional and, I think, Executive. Go to the Swisscom website and find a pdf price list for the corporate Blackberrys and scroll all the way to the bottom. The prices should be 45 and 65 CHF, respectively. Pm me if you need help, I had to go to 4 Swisscom stores before they let me get the Professional contract.

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[Branta]

The real question is "which system" rather than "which phone". It doesn't matter which model within a system.

BlackBerry mail data is heavily compressed and very efficient, so for the same information communicated the data across the network should be much lower than the competitors. However BlackBerry also has some invisible background usage because the network needs to know where to find the phone - this means there will be a few kBytes every day even without any active mail traffic. It is likely the other push phones will also have a similar background rate, and non-push will have to connect to the mail server periodically to check. IOW this background usage is unavoidable unless the user decides to shut down data while roaming (easy on a BlackBerry) and just use voice.

If the phone will also used for significant web browsing while roaming it will be more important to check the billing allowances and rates per megabyte. This is where the costs can really get out of control, and each provider has a different policy.