Vodafone Essar, one of India’s leading cellular services providers, along with Research In Motion (RIM) (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM), a global leader in wireless innovation, today announced the launch of BlackBerry® service plans for its prepaid customers in India. With the new prepaid tariffs, Vodafone customers will now have the flexibility to choose from daily, three day, weekly and monthly offers. Vodafone’s BlackBerry® smartphone customers on the new prepaid service plans can enjoy unlimited access to email, BlackBerry® Messenger, instant messaging, social networking and Internet browsing, as well as access to the BlackBerry AppWorld™ application store, at a pocket friendly price starting at Rs. 15 per day. 

The launch of Vodafone’s BlackBerry prepaid service plans reiterates Vodafone’s promise to make mobile Internet browsing more attractive and economical to all its customers, especially the upwardly mobile youth and enterprising women of today. This service will enable them to do much more on their mobile phones at attractive prices ranging from Rs. 15 per day to Rs. 399 per month. Customers can also access as many as ten supported email accounts such as Hotmail®, Yahoo!® Mail, Google Mail™ and chat on popular services including Windows Live™ Messenger, Google Talk™ and Yahoo!® Messenger. As an additional customer benefit, BlackBerry smartphones can display messages from multiple mailboxes in a single inbox and support the viewing of email attachments including  Microsoft Word (.doc), Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt), Microsoft Excel (.xls), and Adobe pdf (.pdf) documents, as well as image files (.jpg, .bmp, .png, .gif, .tiff).

Kumar Ramanathan, Chief Marketing Officer, Vodafone Essar Ltd.

We are extremely pleased to announce the launch of BlackBerry service plans for our prepaid customers. This segment is highly cost conscious and through the democratization of data services, we are providing an entry threshold at an accessible price point of just Rs. 15 per day. We believe that this initiative will appeal to young professionals, students and a broad spectrum of retail customers who are looking for an exceptional experience for messaging, social networking, email, music and entertainment – on the go! RIM is known for its exceptional mobile communications and strong business reputation and we are delighted to continue our long term alliance. We are certain that our prepaid customers will benefit from the compelling functionality of the BlackBerry solution that’s delivered across our reliable and extensive network in India.