DOES IT HAVE TO BE A BLACKBERRY?

[JamesL]

To the Tech Team or anyone else who can help

Over a year I would not send that many emails but I would receive a lot and although most of them are advertisement's I am still interested in receiving them which means I believed until recently (and this is the reason for this post) that it has to be a blackberry phone in order to enjoy this feature of receiving emails on your phone so whould there be anyone in the tech department or anyone else who knows more about this subject than me who can confirm to me that it does not have to be a Blackberry phone in order to use and enjoy this feature because it scares me a bit that if and when my monthly contract expires which will be the middle of August next year that if I do not get another Blackberry phone then I will no longer be able to send and receive emails which is important to me?

JamesL   

[BandOfBrothers]

All Smartphones have the ability to both send and receive emails. 

A person inputs their email login info into the baked in stock email app or download an alternative one from their particular App Store. 

[63johnw]

Hi, as @BandOfBrothers has said, even the most basic smartphone these days has the ability to send and receive emails.

Android or IOS (Apple).

[jeffkinn]

It has never been true that you can only send and receive emails on a Blackberry phone.

Most smartphones these days are either Apple devices, Android phones or Windows devices. But before that there were Symbian phones, Palm devices and older versions of Windows. All of them had the ability to send and receive emails.

The reason that Blackberrys became so popular was that they combined emails with security and businesses like that aspect of them. Security is now built in to all of the modern phones and they now do everything that Blackberrys used to be able to do and a lot more besides.

So you have a very wide choice of mobiles that will let you send and receive emails from multiple accounts to your heart's desire.

[JamesL]

Thanks very much Jeffkinn for your reply

And it might have sounded like a stupid question but it is one I needed to ask because at the moment the phone I am using requires the Blackberry Internet Service in order to send and receive emails and they might be switching the Blackberry Internet Service off in a year or two from now but even if they are not it adds an extra £5.00 to my monthly price plan that I would rather not pay although I do not believe the new BlackBerry phones need it and as result was thinking of getting one of the new style of Blackberry like the Z10 for example but after what you just told me I might not go for a BlackBerry phone at all the beginning of June which is the earliest I can upgrade on my current monthly price plan.

JamesL

[jeffkinn]

I doubt that the Blackberry services will be turned off anytime soon as there is a huge legacy base of phones out there. But you are right in that the latest batch of Blackberry phones don't need BIS as they use a technology called ActiveSync and that's the same protocal that the other smartphones utilise. We can give you a lot of information and insights here into the different flavours of smartphone. This article is as good a place as any to start:

http://blog.vodafone.co.uk/2015/12/24/looking-for-a-new-phone-in-the-sales-heres-what-each-of-the-ma...