If you can’t wait to surf the Web or check your e-mail on the Costa del Sol, a few words of advice: Think twice about it. Or maybe three or four times.Roaming with your BlackBerry or iPhone abroad to simply make voice calls will cost you an arm and a leg. Using it to surf the Web or send e-mail could cost you your whole body, with bills running into the hundreds of dollars. Early iPhone users learned this the hard way; AT&T forgave some of the most outrageous bills and cautioned users to turn off the automatic e-mail checking that was eating up data usage.But even if you use your smartphone to check e-mail and send photos manually, you could be headed for trouble. And the problem is made worse by the skimpy information provided on the Web sites of the two main GSM wireless providers in the United States: AT&T and T-Mobile. (GSM is the predominant system used in Europe. Sprint and Verizon use CDMA, and most of their phones will not work in Europe.)Both companies’ Web sites state the cost to use data when roaming. But it’s priced in megabytes, a measurement that means nothing to most people. (Can you imagine if your wireless plan told you how many MB of data you could use, rather than how many minutes you had?)How much data you use to send a text or visit a Web site depends on whom you’re asking. T-Mobile’s site says that a text message uses about 3KB, and visiting a Web site will eat up between 250 to 500 KB a page, depending on how many images are on the site.AT&T’s site does not state an equivalency between Web-page access and the amount of data used, although a spokesman said that the company would add that information soon. According to AT&T, visiting a Web site could use 50 to 75 KB a page and checking three e-mail messages could eat up 60 KB
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