Yes. I'm pretty sure UMTS is data and voice. In the 2G world, GSM is voice and EDGE is data...though these terms get blurred a lot.

correct. AT&T routes voice over GSM and UMTS. Hence why, if you drop from 3G while talking, sometimes you lose the call. The handoff sometimes doesn't work quite right.

850 should help this dramatically. They rolled it out here in S.Cal and the reliability increased.

I live in NYC and anyone with an iPhone who visits me in my apartment discovers they have no service. That's why I have a Razr phone with T-Mobile and an iPod touch - no problem with the T-Mobile signal but AT&T, zilch!

Tell them to turn off 3G when they're in your apartment. I go from no service to four bars in a second.

Why doesn't the phone do it itself? I thought it was supposed to.

-David

Dunno. I just know it works.

You're lucky you can do this. ATT disabled the switch on Blackberry Bolds to force the phone to 2g and they did it at the firmware level. Even reflashing the phone with a different provider's implementation of the OS will not restore it.

I think on the 3g as an example, if it is on 3G, then it will try to stay there and indeed, it probably CAN get the signal better than the 2G signal in many areas since the 2g build out pretty much has stopped. So, it won't make the jump to 2G unless it really cannot find a signal. But, we know that the 2g signal works better indoors, up high and in difficult areas. So, one can switch over to enable it - and save some battery as well.

I don't think any provider's implementation had this option. It was a newly released feature in 4.6.0.282. Once i loaded that software rev I had the option. More info here:

http://forums.crackberry.com/f83/off...leased-251060/

AT&T is always behind on certifying their software releases - so I wouldn't expect the AT&T branded release for a while.