I am travelling to India this winter and need to keep in touch with my work email. My company recently issued us all BlackBerry handhelds with communication service from T-Mobile. Our IT guy says that as long as I’m in an area that has T-Mobile GSM/GPRS service (whether directly or through a roaming agreement), I should be able to use my handheld to get email.
Has anyone out there ever actually tried to do this, and, if so, how well did it work?
For reference, I will primarily be in Pune, Nagpur (MS), and Delhi.
If your Blackberry uses the Mobitex or DataTAC networks, it is unlikely to work in India for the purpose of email.
If you have one of the newer Blackberrys that uses the GSM/GPRS network, then it is quite likely that you can use your Blackberry for email, provided that T-Mobile has a roaming agreement with local cellular network operators (which is almost a certainty) and that your device has a frequency band that is used in India. If your Blackberry is Tri-band GSM then it should work here. This is assuming that the Blackberry device does not use any proprietary network protocol and works on any global GSM/GPRS network that hasn’t specifically been setup for Blackberry.
RIM Blackberry itself is set to launch in India sometime next year over the Bharti Telecom AirTel network in India.
If you need further clarification, I could make a few calls for you and ask the network operators here, but their call center operators usually are not very knowledgeable about such things.