Internet help

ab2170

I want to purchase a pda, blackberry to access the internet whilst at work of on the road. I purchased a vodaphone connect card to plug into my laptop however, the cost to surf the net was very expensive. Could any tell me

1) Can you surf the net on a pda/blackberry
2) How much is the cost whilst your surfing the net and how is this done
3) Can i access any web page
4) Can you use a payg simcard
5) Can you use the pda as a phone
6) Can anyone recommend a good product to buy


Any other advice would be appriciated

regards

andy

mondayuk

1) You can surf on the blackberry as it has GPRS modem built in. To surf on the PDA you need to buy a special PDA with GPRS, or buy an adaptor or hook it up to your mobile by Bluetooth for example.
2) If you use GSM network charges differ for GPRS/3G connections, usually about 50p - £1 per Megabyte. GSM which is much slower charges are normally the cost of a regular phone call on your network.
3) The browsers on PDAs and Blackberry devices are limited so in short the answer is usually yes but often the pages look different because of screen sizes, and sometimes they just dont work at all for example if the page heavily uses frames.
4) Not sure about that one. I'd guess GSM would work but I dont know about GPRS/3G.
5) Yes if you buy a PDA such as the XDA from O2. If you want to use it as a phone then it's best to get it on contract from the network as they'll meet some of the cost of the unit which will keep the price to you down. As for a regular PDA you wouldn't be able to use it as a phone as far as i'm aware.
6) I've had no experience with the phone type PDAs. In my opinion the Blackberrys are great devices but to really get the most from them you need your company to hook it up to their email server using the Blackberry Enterprise Server software so that email can be pushed out to the devices. They dont work particularly well as phones in my view. Dell and Acer do some nice budget PDAs, but HP always seems to deliver good reliable ones, but usually at a cost.

Hope this helps.