Worldwide Crackberry

Has someone actually done it? The biggest pain when travelling is that either your international friends and associates need to call your foreign number, or you have to buy a local phone or sim card.

There are problems with both – the first incurrs costs for both you and your callers, and many in the USA in particular have internatonal call-barred phones, courtesy of inward looking corporates.

The second issue is that those pre-pay phones (I recommend Wal*Mart for the USA) don’t roam outside the country where you bought them, and expire before you come back. You also have to start toting multiple phones around. So you are constantly moving phones, and your callers have to know which number is currently active.

Enter the Blackberry 8830 and Verizon Wireless‘s new Global BlackBerry service.

The phone costs US$400, and has both GSM and CDMA EVDO capability. The dual frequency roaming I don’t care about – after all GSM works everywhere.

But that Global Blackberry Service local number feature is the interesting part. What they appear to offer, at $US7o per month, is global email access and the ability to have a local number (for more $ I guess) in a bunch of countries. If they get this right this would be the perfect corporate traveller and even backpacker accessory.

But let’s look at that list of countries:  “Australia, Europe, parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North America”.

I don’t see New Zealand in there  – so I guess it will be the iPhone after all. Meanwhile Verizons international roaming prices have a way to go before sanity.

While at least Sprint is also doing this we are not yet seeing all the elements in place for proper global roaming at local prices. This is Vodafone’s market to take, but they are incredibly slow at doing so.