On that day that will go down the annals of history as BlackBerry’s move to prepaid services, or the day everyone on the planet announces their pay as you go BlackBerry handsets – Carphone Warehouse unveils the 8110 and 8210.

Those two phones are available from January 30^th at the princely sum of £149.95 each, whereas the Orange mobile still reads as ‘coming soon’ on their website. Meaning Carphone Warehouse will get there first, leaving egg or more appropriate, BlackBerry on their face.

Down to the nitty gritty, the full skinny, the complete low down, the full enchilada – everything you needed to know but were too afraid to ask.

These handsets will have unlimited emails to a chosen account, along with access to Facebook and MySpace and all for just £5 per month. Hurrah!

This is all, of course, on a fair usage policy of sorts which hits the ceiling at 50MB per month. After that limit has been reached, an excess can then be paid afterwards which all seems rather fair. Miscellaneous niceties, such as calls and text messaging will relate to the individual tariff as expected and rightly so.

We’ve been told the 8110 in silver and the 8210 in pink will be exclusive to Carphone Warehouse, just in case that tips your favour of hitting them up for a phone and not Orange. Sorry, ‘indigo’ as that’s its colouring.

The 8110 and the 8120 are more or less the same phone, only the latter has WIFI and will be only available on Orange. Whereas the other looks like it’ll be a free for all and dealers choice as to which network the customer wishes to use it on.

It’s a good move for the Carphone Warehouse and the likes of Orange to open up pay as you go BlackBerry handsets and its services to the mass market. Also it’s ideal for those who wouldn’t normally think twice about such a phone, meaning one day there’ll be more BlackBerryites everywhere.

O2 has just launched a credit crunch incentive to their Pay & Go users whenever they top up, as they now receive presents each time they do so. Making Christmas day happen every time they spend money; who said it was better to give than receive?

This is all aimed at those 11.5million users on the prepay tariff who will now be eligible for gifts as a reward for topping up their balance.

These come along in the range of free texts, picture messages, mobile internet browsing and minutes to prizes such as shopping vouchers, cinema tickets, race days or spa experiences. There was even mention of an iPhone too! OoooOOoooOooo

There are two tiers of gift levels, Silver and Gold. Those who splurge £10 will receive the first, whilst those forking over £15 will earn the latter status and 10 times more entries into a separate monthly prize draw.

Also from today onwards every customer topping up their balance will be entered into a prize draw for a gift at the end of the month. November’s prize is a Mini Cooper S, so get topping up now as the days are running out fast.

These guaranteed gifts are also on top of them being famed for giving 10% of the topped-up fee back to users, and apparently are the only network to do so.

Customers will be passed along a code to be checked up their website to see what exactly they’ll receive as a gift.

We expect/hope other networks to follow suit soon, as we’re sure the rest won’t want to be out done by O2.

To find out more click on – www.o2.co.uk/surprises

With a gag we’re going to flog until someone laughs, a new PDA phone arrives on O2 under the Xda brand on both pay as you go and prepay contracts.

Running from the same Marvell PXA930 processor as the soon to be released BlackBerry Storm, the Asus P552w comes to us under the guise of the O2 Xda Zest.

This adds to their already solid foundation of Xda products, which even has an HTC model inside.

Odd we should mentioned that at this choice moment, as the Zest comes off looking like a poor man’s HTC Touch.

O2 are hoping the ‘pay as you go’ pricing model will encourage users to move over from a bog standard mobile to this PDA, without being roped into a long contract tying up the best part of your natural born life.

We did find early references online to the Xda Zest with a much much different handset by Asus associated along with it. A phones only known or referred to as the Galaxy 7, all we can assume is that O2 were going down a different route at one point.

The 2.8-inch screen based handset running Widows Mobile 6.1, also comes with a free 2 week CoPilot Sat Nav trial with full UK and Ireland GPS mapping.

With a 3MP camera, mp3 player, FM radio, Wi-Fi, Quad-band GSM and HSDPA – what more would you want in a starter PDA. That’s a rhetorical question, so please no answers on a postcard.

We questioned the inclusion of 3megapixal camera with O2, as from the specifications we received from Asus had it as being 2MP instead. Looks like they’ve moved on with the model already from when it was announced recently; what a difference a month or so makes.

We’ve been informed by Asus, the phone has a standby time of 300 hrs with 3G and 250 hrs on 2G, and the talk time of 3 hrs with 3G and 5 hrs on 2G.

The phone that shares the name with a bar of soap will be on sale in O2 stores and online at www.o2.co.uk. Costing for the handset on Pay&Go comes in at £249.99, whilst being free on choice O2 Pay Monthly contracts.

Leaked documents picked up by the BoyGeniusReport website has it that RIM are looking towards pay as you go type contracts for their phones.

We spoke to someone linked to RIM today and then the usual candidate of O2, unfortunately they had no knowledge of such as thing and RIM “do not comment on rumours or unrealised products”.

So, that means it could be on the cards it’s just not in solid foundations yet for the UK.

Known for their push email based services, such a price model could be of interest in the budget market place and could also cause a problem or two in terms of exceeding the allotted bandwidth of that month.

We’re unsure what would happen in that case; would emails be bounced back, would an early warning system be flagged to then pay more per megabyte, all seems very curious to us as they undoubtedly move forward with the idea and concept.

As they move towards the more consumer driven market, with the Pearls, the latest Flip and soon to be seen BlackBerry full touch screen Storm phone – it only seems to make sense to expand this way.

Getting the phones into the hands of those on a budget, especially in the current economy, just gets more recognition in our humble opinion and strengthens the brand.

We’ll now climb down off our soapbox and put it away for another day.

See more on the leak here