Event Radio Rentals was featured in the April 1st edition of The Wall Street Journal. The article
Renting a BlackBerry for the Road by Peter King discussed aspects of renting a Blackberry while taking a vacation. See article excerpt below.
Taking vacation? These days when almost everyone's job status feels precarious, leaving your office email unchecked while you're away seems a tad risky. That note from the boss with a Word, Excel or PDF attachment may not wait until you get home.
Lugging a laptop is one solution. But if you need on-the-road email and data services only a few times a year and don't own a smart phone, renting a BlackBerry is a good option. To see how easy it is to rent a BlackBerry, we contacted four cellphone-rental companies including Event Radio Rentals. Each rents various brands of smart phones as well as data cards. We decided to stick with BlackBerry devices because they're most commonly used with corporate email.
Each company told us that most of their customers are international travelers, who may find their U.S. carriers' phone coverage spotty or nonexistent overseas. That was not an issue for us.
We explained to each representative that we were driving from Phoenix to Las Vegas for a three-day getaway and needed a smart phone primarily to retrieve email, view attachments and do occasional Web browsing. We would be taking our regular not-so-smart cellphone, which we knew would work fine for calls during the trip. We told each representative that we are not a BlackBerry user, and we did not request a specific model. We said we wanted to bring the bill in as low as possible.
Since we opted for normal ground shipping, it took about a week for our BlackBerrys to arrive. Overnight shipping is available from all vendors we contacted.
An email caveat: Configuring a rental BlackBerry to retrieve personal email is no problem. But getting corporate email depends on an employer's policy. If your company allows you to retrieve email using any computer connected to the Internet, you should be able to get your mail and attachments from a rental BlackBerry. But some forbid remote retrieval or forwarding. Your IT department may be able to provide you with a solution.
Each service gives you the option of configuring the device yourself, or they'll set it up using your email address and password. If you go this route, make sure you turn off all connections using the "Manage Connections" application before you send the BlackBerry back -- each vendor provided us with a prepaid, addressed envelope -- or it will keep retrieving your email. It's a good idea to change your password once you get home, although the four vendors said they purge all personal information from their mail servers.
Event Radio Rentals also wanted us to fax back a rental agreement, but the Forest Hills, N.Y.-based company didn't require a photo ID. The phone we got from Event Radio was also a Curve, in this case an 8330. We gave Event Radio's tech people our email address and passcode. When the phone arrived, it was ready to go and our email was pulled in as if we were sitting at our office computer. To hold down costs, our rep rented us a BlackBerry that did not have phone services. As an email retriever and Web browser, the unit performed flawlessly.
If you get hung up while using the phones, all of these vendors feature 24-hour telephone tech support. Event Radio's tech people contacted us before they sent out the unit to make sure the email configuration was correct
Contact Event Radio rentals about renting a BlackBerry. |
