[quote=AN][quote=CDMA ENG][quote=UCGalBut I’ve come to realize that it’s a lifestyle thing driven by kids with texting and mobile internet.
I resisted texting for a long time, but I now need it to communicate with friends and relatives. Of course with the iPhone and all the other smart phones out there, a $30 data plan is compulsory. Add texting that that’s an extra $50.
It’s an affordable luxury. Consumers are now hit with so many affordable luxuries that it’s hard to keep up.
.[/quote]
All of the PDA/Smartphone require a data plan… It’s because you can not shut-down the data part of the device and simply use it as a phone…
CE[/quote]
I used to have a Blackberry Pearl. AT&T let me have that phone w/ no data plan. BTW, I’m pretty sure you can totally shut down the data part of the device if they really wanted too. You might not be able to do it on the system side, but doing it in the OS or even app level is totally possible. There’s just no real good business case to spend extra money to develop such feature.[/quote]
Must have been an older (2G) model. The problem is the PDAs sit on the data channel and try to do their business there. If they can not obtian the data channel then the go to the much slow voice/data channel. Which really makes things bad on the network. Sprint use to let you do that as well until they saw the destruction it caused the network… That is why the really don’t allow it now. As for the RIM device it is hard coded to check in with their data servers… except now they are banging away at the voice channel… Trust me… RIM knows my name by now and they don’t like me…
But yeah… your are correct about them changing the OS if they wanted too but they won’t… goes against why having a Blackberry device…
