I have an android and am sick of the silly apps and touch screens, my data plan is one of the unlimited types when they had them,
I was looking at a used
and wanted to know do I need to have a contract with the blackberry stuff for this unit or can i use my plan as it is now and just activate the unit, what are the benefits if any? for the blackberry?
You should be able to activate the Bold on your unlimited plan. You will need to set up a blackberry email, and an account at Blackberry world is helpful for apps and backups and goodies.
I moved from a BB Bold 9650 to Android a few months ago - the two OS are quite different, and both have their good and bad points. Blackberry is very conservative with data - I rarely went over 50 MB a month, although I have wifi available most of the time. The one month I spent traveling with little wifi I still barely broke 100 mb of usage. Now that I have Droid, even with wifi on most of the time, I easily use 100 mb or more; without the wifi I'm pushing 1.5 GB, still under the 2 GB limit I have.
The BB was better at mail, tho the Droid is adequate. The Droid is better at web browsing and the apps are more numerous and seem to function more smoothly - it may be because it's 4g and the Bold is 3g - the screen is bigger on the Droid so easier to see and "do" things.
What apps, if any, do you regularly use? How do you use your phone when it's not being used as a phone? Music? Games? Navigation? (the navigation on the Droid is far better than the BB app, IMO). Email? Texting?
As SuzyQ stated, your plan won't change.
To summarize, the benefits are an awesome keyboard with shortcuts, bedside mode, endlessly customizable sound profiles, push email and BBM (if you like instant messaging with anyone in the world at no additional cost).
The drawbacks in moving from Android to BBOS5/6 are a smaller display, fewer apps and the browser is slow. If you have another device to use for browsing, you're more likely to enjoy BlackBerry ownership. I recommend you mostly browse on Wi-Fi and you download Opera Mini, which is slightly faster than the native browser.
Although BlackBerry has come a long way since OS5/6, I think a used 9650 would be an OK way to get a feel for the OS before investing a lot into it.
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