Orange Upgrade Question - BB without BIS

[Alorko]

Hi , im due an upgrade on my orange contract . I had , 9 months ago , my girlfriends upgrade of a HTC Hero , which im perfectly happy with . My question is , she would ideally like the BB 9700 now , which i can upgrade to but can i upgrade to this phone without taking the BB add ons , ie can i keep a normal data plan that will work with my Hero so i can give her the BB and she can just get the BB add on added to her existing contract ?

I can only ring orange of a lunchtime or evening , so before i hang on for ages on the phone , just wondered if any one knew , save my self some time .

Cheers

[MC Rubber Chicken]

so your giving your partner your upgrade that shes gonna use with her sim? if thats the case then yes but prob not over the phone... as they pretty much demand you have the BIS add on when taking a BB but in store its not an issue.. she would just need to add the BIS to HER account so the blackberry would work with data!!

[brdevine]

Sorry to resurrect this, but I just upgraded my wifes phone to a Blackberry Curce 8520 on Orange Dolphin 15. She only used her old phone for texting and sending receiving the odd photo message (MMS), so the phone looked appealing for the fact that it had an actual keyboard. We did the upgrade in store, paid £6 to transfer all the old photos, text messages and contacts list from her old phone to the Blackberry (after checking when we got home, only text messages from the beginning of July were transferred, and not all the photos have gone across either).

Anyway, the big issue was that we didn't take the BIS option, as she would not be using the phone for internet/email. However, the phone was unable to send or receive photo messages. After several calls to Orange, I was told twice that I needed to purchase the extra BIS option to be able to send/receive picture messages. Does anyone know if that is true? I'd have thought that MMS was a standard network feature.

I ended up adding the BIS option and can now send receive picture messages, but it's bugging me that I may be paying for an extra that I don't really need. Does anyone have any knowledge/experience of this?

Thanks in advance!

[MC Rubber Chicken]

yes this is right as your phone will not do anything that uses data.. like downloading the mms from the web to your phone.. you need this BIS for anything apart from calls and text..

[brdevine]

yes this is right as your phone will not do anything that uses data.. like downloading the mms from the web to your phone.. you need this BIS for anything apart from calls and text..

Thanks for the info. :thumbs: It's just a shame the sales guy in the shop didn't mention it.

[singhstar]

Quick bump

I'm a little confused about how BIS works, I know it basically enables the data side of the phone and allows access to the internet and BB Messenger. If I add it to my account does it include a data allowance or would I have to pay orange extra to arrange a separate data allowance on top of the BIS.

Thanks

[MC Rubber Chicken]

blackberry run their own data network seperate to orange or the other networks, thats why you have to pay to access this. but yes you get an allowance of data on this but your BB compresses data by about 70% before it hits your handset so you'll realistically never get anywhere near the limit