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I recently bit the bullet and bought the BlackBerry Bold I’d coveted for so long.  One of the primary drivers was that I’m due to spend a fair bit of time in Japan this year, and I wanted a phone that I could use over there.  My first trip is fast approaching (next week), and as part of my preparations, I thought I’d check the details of my ‘phone plan.  Sadly, it appears that although my ‘phone will technically work in Japan, actually using it there is a whole ‘nother ball game.

To start with, AT&T list the international roaming charges in Japan as $2.29 per minute for voice service.  What??  How do they even work this out? It’s outrageous, especially as they have a data network (the Internet) that they could quite easily route the calls over, and close to zero cost.   Needless to say, I’m not paying it.  I can get a calling card that gives me international calls at around $0.02 a minute, so that will do for the few times when I call rather than email.  (Given the time difference of 14 hours between home and Japan, I won’t be doing a lot of calling.)  They also charge $0.50 for sending an SMS.  Fifty cents to send a 140-character text updating my status on Twitter??  It’s a good job I’m not one of these people who Tweets every little thing they do…  “Dirk is Waiting for a bus”.  “Dirk is The bus is late” (I know, FB need to drop the “…is…”, and cater to those of us who prefer to craft our own, grammatically correct status updates).  “Dirk is On the bus”, etc., etc.  I’d be bankrupt by the time I got to the hotel.

But the voice service is only half of it.  Voice I can do without.  What is important is the data service.  Which is always charged for separately, despite it all running over the same physical network.  Here in the U.S. I pay whatever I pay for my voice service (it’s difficult to say exactly what, as I have two mobiles and a home line all bundled into a ‘family plan’) and then another $35.00 per month for a “BlackBerry data plan”, which gives me unlimited data access anywhere AT&T’s vaunted 3G network is available.  Note the emphasis on “BlackBerry data plan”.  I previously had a Sony-Ericsson K790i smartphone (which also had Internet browsing and IMAP email access), and the unlimited data plan for that was only $20.00 a month.  Note that both plans are “unlimited data”.  The only difference with the Blackberry plan is that it is a BlackBerry plan.  In essence, I’m paying more just because I want to use a Blackberry.  And who gets this extra $15.00 a month?  Not RIM (manufacturers of the BlackBerry) – AT&T, that’s who.  The same people I’m already paying for the voice service – which, incidentally, is using exactly the same infrastructure as the data service, so exactly what ‘extra’ are they providing for this extra $15.00 a month?

Anyway, despite me having a $35.00 “unlimited data” plan, this is only unlimited within the fair shores of the United States.  I checked the ‘roaming’ charges, and for Japan, there is a charge of $0.0195 per kilobyte for ‘data roaming’.  That’s per kilobyte. One of the reasons people have BlackBerry devices as opposed to ‘regular’ phones is the email ‘push’ – emails are automatically forwarded to the device as soon as they hit the server (which is usually as soon as they are sent).  Admittedly most emails are fairly small, but by the time you’ve added a couple of email accounts (I have three that I check on a regular basis – and that doesn’t include my actual ‘work’ account which they won’t let me divert to my personal Blackberry), all of which get some degree of spam, store subscriptions, and other assorted crud that could realistically wait until I logged onto my laptop, the kb-count starts racking up.  And unfortunately, there’s not an easy way of switching off individual accounts with a Blacberry. You get all or nothing. so if I want to receive the ‘important’ stuff in Japan, I’m also going to have to pay to receive all of the crap as well.

But even if I did decide I could cope without emails until I found a wi-fi hotspot and could access them for free, there’s all the other things I’d like to do.  A photo taken on the Bold’s (risible) 2megapixel camera weighs in at around 350kb.  Which means that if I want to take a photo of Mount Fuji, it will cost me an astounding $7.00 so send it to my Flickr account, which is barely worth it given the marginal interest in what I do or see.

It gets worse.  One of the other nice things about the Bold is it’s built-in GPS.  But a screenful of map data is around 200kb. Depending on your speed and the scale of the map on the screen, it wouldn’t be unrealistic to drive from side to side of the screen in about a minute.  That’s $4.00 a minute, just for the privilege of having AT&T Navigator tell you that you’re lost in a strange country.

Oh, wait a minute. Did I say AT&T Navigator?  Hmm, well, that’s not going to work in Japan.  Matter of fact, it won’t work anywhere other than in the United States.  If you want GPS service in Japan (or any other country apart from the good ole U.S. of A.) you’re going to need AT&T International Navigator. And that’s going to cost you $19.95 a month extra.  On top of whatever “unlimited data plan” you may already have.  Think about it.  The time when you’re most likely to need GPS is when you’re in a (literally) foreign place, but under the standard plan, you don’t get that.  It’s like saying: Well, we’ll happily tell you what you know already, but if you want us to tell you what you need to know, we’re going to charge you for it.  Gee, thanks, AT&T!

In fact, the whole paying for AT&T Navigator is a complete rip-off anyway.  The BlackBerry Bold, as shipped by RIM, comes with BlackBerry Maps pre-installed.  This is a navigation system that also works in conjunction with the in-built GPS receiver.  And it’s free.  However, AT&T remove it, and replace it with their own AT&T Navigator, which you then have to pay $9.99 a month for (and this is the ‘domestic U.S.’ plan).  To be fair, what AT&T Navigator gives you that Blackberry Maps doesn’t is spoken turn-by-turn directions.  Surely, you could argue (as I’m sure AT&T do) that is worth paying for?  Well, not really.  I bought my wife a Garmin GPS recently.  That also includes spoke turn-by-turn directions, and there’s no subscription fee at all – just the initial cost of the unit (which, incidentally, was less than half the price of the Bold).  Which shows that there is zero ongoing cost to supply this service, so AT&T are literally getting money for nothing.

But after all of that, it turns out that AT&T International Navigator isn’t available in Japan anyway, so I couldn’t even give AT&T my money if I wanted to.  Nor is BlackBerry Maps (which I managed to re-install via the back-door anyway).  Which means that I will have to resort to (the also free) Google Maps for finding my way around the back-streets of downtown Shinagawa.

So all-in-all, between the push emails, uploading photos, and using the GPS, the data roaming fees (even at $0.0195 a kilobyte) would rack up so fast that I’d be scared of even turning my Bold on in Japan. Which is just stupid, especially as AT&T advertise this as a “World Phone”.  ‘Luckily’, AT&T have a solution.  For $24.95 you can get a 20meg a month plan, or for $59.95 you can get a 50meg a month plan.   But on a three-week trip to Japan, I’m pretty sure I’ll burn through 50 meg.  The final option is an “unlimited international data plan”, for $65.00.  That sounds like a good deal, especially when compared to the 50 meg plan, but there’s a catch (of course!).  If you want the unlimited international data plan, you have to sign up for it for a minimum of 12 months.  That’s right. You have to be abroad for 12 months to make the most of the plan.  But if I was going to be in Japan for 12 months, I’d just buy myself a Bold in Japan, and pay NTT DoCoMo significantly less for the same level of service.  Again, AT&T are fleecing people just because they can, and without any regard for fairness or practicality!

So all in all, this Bold thing may not actually turn out to be a boon in Japan, thanks to AT&T saying: “Hey, here’s a cool phone that works all over the world! What’s that? You actually want to use it all over the world?  Well, we’re gonna need all of your money for that.  All of it.  ALL OF IT!!”  Damn scammers!

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Tags: AT&T, BlackBerry, phone, travel