I was shopping in Costco one day and stopped by the cell phone booth, where they sell phones from various vendors. I discovered that Tmobile has pretty good customer satisfaction and coverage, especially in the Bay Area. I also found out that they have among the cheapest plans of all the national carriers.
Their plans start at $29.99 for 350 minutes, compared to $39.99 for the same number of minutes for most other carriers. $39.99 on Tmobile will get you 600 minutes.
I also found out that the Blackberry Curve (8320) for T-mobile is different than the Curve for Sprint or Verizon. While the Sprint and Verizon versions of the Curve have GPS, the T-mobile version supports WiFi (and no GPS). Not only that, but you can make phone calls over the WiFi through any hotspot that you have access to, and as a T-mobile subscriber, you would have free access to any T-mobile hotspot.
Even when making calls over WiFi, it will go against your plan's minutes, but I did discover that if you make calls from Europe back to the US over a WiFi hotspot, it won't get charged as a roaming/long-distance call. Not only that, but if you subscribe to a $10/month plan called HotSpot Anywhere, or something like that, then your WiFi calls won't get charged to your minutes at all. Even more interesting is that if you start a call on WiFi and get out of range of the network, it will automatically switch you over to a cell tower without dropping the call, or the other way around. The entire call gets treated as if the call were made on the original network. So if you start on WiFi, it doesn't matter if you switch to GSM, it still won't count your minutes.
This is very attractive to me because I frequently have access to a WiFi hotspot, especially at home or at work, so I figure I'll be making most of my calls over a WiFi hotspot and I can just use the rest of my minutes when I'm out of range of WiFi. This should enable me to pick a fairly low-end plan without worrying about going over my minutes.
The other thing I discovered is that while Verizon requires you to get the Blackberry service with the Curve, it isn't a requirement with T-mobile. So if you can live without the Blackberry service, you can lower your subscription rates even further. It would defeat the purpose of getting a Blackberry with the service on Verizon, but with T-mobile, there are quite a few things you can do over WiFi even without the service, so T-mobile suddenly jumped into my radar for consideration.
I found out later that to get the current $50 rebate, you had to sign up for some minimum Blackberry plan for at least two months. The Blackberry plans are $10/month for email only (BIS), or $20/month for email plus internet. They also have an enterprise email (BES) plan, but I have no use for that one.
