BlackBerry price cuts in advance of iPhone launch

If you’ve refused to drink the iPhone Kool-Aid, but have also been holding out for a great deal on a QWERTY smartphone to sate your mobile email needs, your lucky number could be 3.

Australia’s 3G-only carrier has lopped $20 per month off its $79, $99 and $129 plans, in what pundits suggest is to clear stocks of the ageing BlackBerry 8707g 3G handset in readiness for next month’s arrival of the BlackBerry Bold. And while the 8707g isn’t the coolest BlackBerry of the bunch it’s certainly one of the more robust, and partnered with Three’s new rates you’d be hard-pressed to find a better value bundle for managing your mobile email.

This is a welcome dose of competition in the largely price-stagnant BlackBerry market. Carriers have largely stuck to a predictable set of plans, and the last serious shake-up to the status quo was when Three introduced the BlackBerry onto its mobile menu in early April.

The new discount is parcelled up as a $20 monthly credit on the existing plans, but the end result is the same. You can now sign up for a BlackBerry on a 24 month contract from $59, which includes $350 of capped calls and messaging, $240 worth of ‘Free Talk’ calls to other Three mobiles, unlimited BlackBerry data and 2GB of mobile broadband for using your BlackBerry as a ‘tethered USB modem’ for your Windows laptop (RIM currently doesn’t offer Mac-based modem drivers). While the 8707g doesn’t hit HSDPA speeds you can still expect around 200-300Kbps.

The $79 per month plan boosts the capped call value to $550 with $210 of calls to other Three mobiles. Curiously, that’s $30 less than the ‘Free Talk’ allocation of the cheaper $59 plan. So either the cheaper plan is actually a much better deal if many of your mates are on Three, or there’s a typo on the Web page which Three would be bound to honour, meaning the cheaper plan would still be a much better deal if many of your mates are on Three.

The $109 per month deal boosts the capped call value to an astounding $800, although as with the two other plans the international call value is pegged at $100 per month, and $280 of calls to Three mobiles. All plans have the same 2GB allocation for mobile broadband, which we reckon is a little stingy – if you’re paying almost twice as much per month, you should get at least another 50% of mobile data tossed in.

Another bonus is the unlimited email also applies in  UK, Austria Denmark, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy or Sweden, where Three subscribers can roam onto ‘sister networks’ as part of the ‘3 Like Home’ service and still enjoy BlackBerry email without extra costs such as a per-session flag fall or data roaming charges. Just don’t fire up the BlackBerry as a mobile broadband modem, because the roaming data fee in that mode is 50c/MB.

Unlike its competitors, however, Three has no GSM service as a fallback for when you move into a low-signal or no-signal 3G zone. By default, customers in that situation automatically roam onto Telstra’s GSM network and are hit with a $1.65/MB tariff. This has already delivered an unwelcome end-of-month sting to many of Three’s unwary mobile broadband customers.

To avoid this fate befalling BlackBerry subscribers each of Three’s plans include 2MB of nation-wide roaming data, which the carrier reckons translates to around 1,000 ‘average’ emails. However, using services such as Google Maps will gobble up more data than emails, so if you’re in on the cusp of Three’s coverage or in a known low signal area we suggest you keep an eye on the screen in case the ‘Roaming’ indicator appears.