While this is more or less a given, we guess that there are some users out there who were hoping that there was a chance that come Blackberry 10, RIM will stop making users subscribe to a Blackberry data plan and instead just use regular plans like everyone else. Well it turns out that won’t be the case, and in a post explaining the Dev Alpha A and Dev Alpha B to developers, RIM confirmed that Blackberry 10 devices will need to subscribe to a Blackberry data plan.
Should you decide to get a microSIM for your Dev Alpha, you do not need to have “BlackBerry Data” turned on for the account. Connectivity will be work with regular Internet access alone. There may be some carriers where data connectivity doesn’t work, but Wi-Fi will work for you in that case. Please note that this is the case just for the Dev Alpha device and not BlackBerry 10 launch devices, which will need to have BlackBerry data on the wireless plan.
Some might argue that by going through RIM’s servers, it would be a lot more secure and this was and still is the selling point for RIM to sell their services to individuals and companies that need to secure their data. However with the Blackberry services outage back in 2011, it does give some credence to the saying of not putting all our eggs into one basket. Either way this is probably a matter of personal opinion and we will leave it at that.