Using BlackBerry with Generic Data Plan?

lewt

Hi all.

My wife has a BB pear 3G which at the moment she is using on t-mobile and pays an extra £5 a month to use the BIS however she uses nothing of the features and is coming to an end of her contract.

She would still like to use the phone as she likes it and is very particular about them (we went through loads before she found this one)

However I would like the new iPhone4 and am willing to get the 12 month contact with them and give her the sim but this only comes with 1GB of data and no BB service.

All she will use the data for is a bit of facebook at work and maybe light browsing.

Could this be done or does it HAVE to have the BB service paid for to work at all?

Thanks

lewt

I have been googling and found this.

Using BlackBerry with Generic Data Plan:

You cannot use the resident BlackBerry internet browser; you will need to use a third party browser such as Opera Mini
You cannot use BlackBerry Push email; you can only check your email through a third party browser such as Opera Mini or through a third party mail app such as Gmail Mobile App or through a third party push mail service such as Shangmail
You cannot use BlackBerry Messenger service and cannot use the BlackBerry optimised apps for Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger & Windows Live Messenger; you can only use third party apps such as IM+
You cannot use the latest version of Facebook (v1.7); you can use the older version (v1.6) and you can access the mobile version of Facebook from Opera Mini browser
You can use any third party apps such as TwitterBerry which allow you to specify your internet connection as regular TCP/IP instead of BIS
You cannot install apps over the air (OTA) since it requires the resident browser; you will need to use the Desktop Manager interface to install any of the third party apps mentioned above for browsing, email, messaging or social networking
You can tether your phone to a laptop for accessing internet on the move. In fact, on some networks, if you subscribe to the costlier Blackberry data plan, it won’t include this ability. You will need to subscribe to a generic data plan separately over & above your premium data plan to do so!

Has anyone done this?