8ta and Research In Motion (RIM) today announced that the BlackBerry solution will be available for 8ta customers. The offer will be available in 8ta and TelkomDirect outlets from 24 April 2011, with a price tag from R59 per month, and with free mobile YouTube streaming of up to 500MB per month.
The BlackBerry solution brings together smartphones, software and services to allow easy wireless access to email, messaging, social networking, phone, calendar, web, multimedia and other business and lifestyle applications. 8ta customers will now be able to enjoy the freedom and productivity benefits of using their BlackBerry smartphone to stay connected to people and information while on the go.
At launch, 8ta will offer a free BlackBerry Internet Service subscription for the first three months for customers on Contract 1 with the BlackBerry® Curve™ 8520 smartphone. At the end of the three months, 8ta customers subscribed to the hero deal will enjoy a further discounted BlackBerry Internet Service plan of R49 (incl. VAT) per month for the remaining 21 month duration of their contract.
“We believe that the BlackBerry solution will help to ensure that our customers go beyond just using email and Internet on their smartphones. We also aim to enhance the offering with free mobile YouTube streaming, which is a first in South Africa,” said Amith Maharaj, Managing Executive of 8ta.
“We are pleased to work with 8ta to offer the BlackBerry solution to customers in South Africa,” says Deon Liebenberg, Managing Director for Africa at RIM.
At launch 8ta will offer the BlackBerry Curve 3G and BlackBerry Curve 8520 smartphones. Soon thereafter, the BlackBerry Bold9780 and BlackBerry Torch 9800 smartphones will also be offered.
8ta will offer BlackBerry Enterprise Server for corporate customers (from R89 per month) and BlackBerry Internet Service for smaller businesses (from R59 per month) and individual users.
BlackBerry Enterprise Server is for organizations that manage their own email servers. The BlackBerry Enterprise Server software tightly integrates with IBM Lotus Domino, Microsoft Exchange and Novell GroupWise and uses advanced security and IT policy controls to enable secure, push-based wireless access to email and other corporate data.
BlackBerry Internet Service is designed for smaller businesses and individuals. It allows customers to access BlackBerry data services including Internet and access to up to 10 supported corporate and personal email accounts (including most popular ISP email accounts such as Yahoo! Mail and Google Mail) from a BlackBerry smartphone.
