Big Warning

That's NOT true if international. If you would be incurring international roaming charges, then you will still incur them if you start the call on UMA and roam to EDGE or GSM.

My experience with t-mobile UMA
 

I have Blackberry Curve 8320. In May 2009 I stayed at a hostel in Milan, Italy with free wi-fi. The wifi requires a password but I can't recall what kind of security authentication (WEP, WPA, TKIP, etc). Since I was a hostel guest, I can use the wifi freely.

I walk up close to the wi-fi transmitter, set my Blackberry to "Manage Connections", disable "mobile network", enable "wi-fi", follow the wizard to look for wifi, enter password. Viola! Within 1 minute I have "UMA" status on the right top corner. I called friends and parents in USA and sent couple text messages "Guess... I am in Milan now, bla bla bla...". The minutes and SMS were billed as domestic usage. No international roaming or surprise bill whatever.

gunsar, do you have H@H?

UMA add-on is dead?
 

Someone on howardchui.com forum just posted that the H@H add-on for $9.99 is no longer available on the TMO website.

If true, that means UMA feature still works but now it counts against your bucket of minutes.

Yes and no... it's not available for the new even less plans ... it is still available if you are grandfathered on older plans. Their thinking seems to be that if you're on one of the new plans, it's cheaper to get the unlimited minutes option (or at least more profitable).

If you ARE grandfathered, the older plans seems to be significantly less expensive than the new plans.

I used my UMA on my Blackberry all the time while I was in Solvokia and India. You do not need to have H@H to use the UMA feature. H@H just makes UMA calls unlimited. Without it, it will just pull from your minutes like a normal local call (even when you are out of the country).

I've heard customer service say that if you start the call on UMA and then step out onto the cellular network the entire calls is free even if the network you step out onto is a foreign network. I have a hard time believing that in reality you wouldn't drop the call if you tried this little experiment. TMobile had a horrible problem doing handoffs to its own network and had to do a ton of work to finally get it right. I'm just real skeptical that you could make the handoff work walking out of your hotel room and stepping onto the Vodafone network.