Help me with Blackberry & Sprint!! *blackberry n00b*

[Cyburke]

Sup sup! First post to the Wireless Advisor forum..

Anyways.. my dad has Sprint and just got a Blackberry 7750 from them.. First off they charged him $549 for the fawkin' thing and then gave him $100 credit so now down to $449. He's been w/ Sprint for probably 5 years now as a normal phone user. I think they are totally ***king him.

Now they are telling him that he has to pay $45 / month extra if he wants an email address for his blackberry phone and to be able to send email and stuff.. I thought the whole point of blackberry was that you could install an app on your computer that would check all your personal emails and then send them to the Blackberry server which would in turn "download" them to your phone.

Is this not correct?

I know a fair amount about cell phones and whatnot and always buy mine on Ebay or likewise rather than paying out the nose from the service provider. I found some Nextel 7750's on Ebay for $369 and ****. (I understand they wouldn't work for him, just comparing.)

Does anyone here have specific knowledge of Blackberry and Sprint combined? If so would you please provide details on your setup / costs. I think he's getting bent over the table on this one.

Thanks!!

[eagle63]

Does your dad's company have/use BES? (Blackberry exchange server) In other words, does his company deploy the BES service for it's employees? Based on your question, I'm assuming that answer is no. Which kinda begs the question of why he got a Blackberry in the first place.

Sorry, I really don't know anything about Sprint's pricing structure for their BB, but I'm guessing that $45 is correct if Sprint is handling the administration of the server-side stuff.

[ZaphodB]

BES stands for Blackberry Enterprise Server. It's a business-class server application that installs on top of e-mail clients (like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Enterprise, sendmail, procmail, etc.) and sets security for Blackberries accessing corporate e-mail.

$45 a month for Blackberry data sounds reasonable to me. If it's $10 and they're charging him $45 just for Blackberry e-mail (and nothing else) then that's ed up. Verizon charge $50 for unlimited Blackberry data.