Originally Posted by paradox606
I just returned from Europe, and the Verizon 8830 worked fantastically well for me on the trip.
I found the quality of the voice calls was actually better then it is in the US. However, the per minute rate is a constant $1.29 per minute in most of western europe, and $2.49/min in most of eastern europe.
I was able to receive calls ok, and was able to avoid most of my calls by communicating with blackberry messenger or using yahoo instant messenger and google chat.
Shape Services IM+ Skype client was very helpful for making calls, I was able to use my blackberry as a sort of phone switchboard, and connect calls to my hotel to the person I was calling, and only pay about 8 cents per minute for the call through skype. This required the person I was calling to ask for my room number when the call connected, but it worked well enough for our purposes.
Google maps was a hugely useful resource while walking about in barcelona, valencia, london and paris, and was somewhat useful in croatia, although its road map data was a little sparse there.
I was unable to use dial up networking via USB using the *99# number, none of the dialup settings I pilferred off the internet apparently worked, I suspect that verizon has disabled DUN when on GPRS data mode.
However, I had no problems whatsoever surfing the internet using the phone itself in the following places:
Croatia, Dubovnik to Split and all islands in-between
London, UK
Spain, Barcelona to Valencia (drove the route and had internet throughout)
Paris, France.
I took the Eurostar high speed train from London to Paris, and had continuous GPRS data coverage the entire duration of the trip, except of course while we were in the Chunnel.
I was able to get limited internet on my laptop by using the MobiShark modem.
Mobishark worked, however I would not call this software "release" quality.
If you are patient and a bit of a tinkerer, its sufficient to get to most web pages , and surprisingly, it worked very well with google earth, which was quite a joy while I was touring the croatian islands on a boat.
Using mobishark and some speed tests on broadbandreports.com, I was able to check data rates on my travels.
The data rates on GRPS varied from about 2 kb/sec up to 8kb/sec. The fastest internet I encountered was in Croatia, I was getting 12kb/sec sustained speed tests while about 10 miles off-shore near the island of Mljet.
I highly recommend the global email plan on verizon to anybody who does a lot of travelling, you can use a variety of messenger programs to communicate with friends and family, thereby dodging the shocking roaming rates usually associated with roaming US cell phones.
I checked my mobishark counter at the end of the trip, and I had downloaded about 400MB of data through mobi-shark, and my verizon bill shows zero additional cost for that data. Try to find that on any european cell phone, good luck!
We purchased a number of these phones for our family, and were able to communicate and regroup while walking about various places we visited by using the blackberry messenger, which was absolutely free of cost.
The only downside to the verizon variant of the blackberry 8800 is that verizon has disabled the built-in GPS, which would have been really useful while walking about.
Best Regards,
paradox606
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