I just purchased a 7100t from T-mobile and have been doing alot of reading. My question that is still unclear to me is-- the IM Client that comes pre-loaded on the blackberry does that use SMS for sending/receiving converstations/buddylist etc... ? and secondly how is this billed if so ?

I am signed up for the "Blackberry WebClient Plan - Blackberry Unlimited - $19.99/month - Unlimited Web browsing & BlackBerry Web Client e-mail access 300 inbound/outbound messages; $0.05 each additional message"

Would I be charged per text message when using the IM client ? I have been getting mixed answers... I just got off the phone with T-mobile and the rep told me all Blackberry blans ARE Unlimited TEXT messaging.

My second question is I understand there are alternative programs out there that use BES/MDS connections such as Webmessenger... but I do not subscribe to such a service and going to wait it out til 4.0 is released. Is there anyway to use a program like webmessenger with the plan i am subscribed to ?

Thanks !

The Blackberry plans come in a few flavors:

$19.99 gets you an add-on plan for any existing voice plan, and in that package you get just 300 SMS messages.

$59.99 gets you 1000 anytime minutes and unlimited SMS

And yes, the IM client DOES use SMS messages, so 300 messages are easilly reached when you IM a lot. Although; the IM client does not ALWAYS use IM, it can also use regular data, but it seems like the implementation T-mobile did is pretty messed up. There is a thread here on the IM client that discusses these problems.