BIS

What’s that?

The Blackberry Internet Service (BIS) allows to recieve your mails in pull. It can be Gmail, for instance. You need to suscribe on your carrier Blackberry portal. For instance, the one for the swiss operator Swisscom is: mobileemail.swisscom.ch

What can we do with it?

What you need to know about the BIS, called Blackberry E-mail by Swisscom:

• you can only retrieve your emails in pull mode.
• No calendar and contact synchronization is possible.

How much?

By Swisscom, the activation is free of charge. But not the data.

1MB of data cost 10CHF. Note that it concerns only Emails, not regular data like web browsing, which costs 14CHF/MB.

By Swisscom, you can suscribe at different options; for instance, you pay 20CHF/month and get 5MB of mail. Have a look here: http://www.swisscom-mobile.ch/scm/prv_blackberry_option-fr.aspx

Must know

Blackberry mail and data plan are two separates things. For instance, by Swisscom, you cannot have both a data plan and a BIS activated.

Having to push and calendar/contact synchronization, the BIS seems to be for private usage.

How to?

You need to ask your carrier to activate the BIS (ie to register you phone on the Blackberry network).

Conclusion

I fail to see any advantages to this plan. Expensive, no push and no data plan. I’d rather buy another push compatible smartphone coming with a data plan; it’s far more interesting.

BES

What’s that?

The BES (Blackberry Enterprise Service) is, as named, for companies. It allows push synchronization with mails, calendar and contacts with the mail server of your company (Exchange, Lotus, etc).

How?

To have the BES, your company needs to have the Blackberry service running on their mail server. This service is quite expensive.

Next, you need to suscribe to the BES at your carrier.

By Swisscom, this is possible only if you’re a company. A private person cannot have this BES activated.

How much?

By Swisscom, the BES is at least 45CHF/Month with 250MB of mails included. For 69CHF/Month you have also 5MB of mails international roaming.

To this, you have obviously to add the basic voice plan.

Good to know

The BES plan can be cancelled at any moment, unlike the 12/24 months voice plans.

Swisscom needs 1-3 days until the BES is set up.

There’s no data plan included. Means that the 250MB only covers the mails. If you decide to visit your favorite website, you’ll pay for it.

Conclusion

Expensive. Not to mention that, unlike the Iphone, the Blackberry comes with little applications. If you want to edit you Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents, you’ll have to buy a licence.

In one sentence; click and pay.