Around the World

I have a Blackberry Bold 9650 and was thinking of purchasing a prepaid local SIM card when I travel to Israel. I found out today that neither AT&T nor T-Mobile will allow the transmission of data on their prepaid SIM cards for foreigners traveling to the U.S. That got me wondering whether it would be the same with regard to foreign cellphone service providers. If so, then I can think of only two practical choices if I want to take advantage of inexpensive phone calls while overseas but still want to receive My data. These two choices are:

1. Purchase a cheap unlocked GSM phone to use for phonecalls where I install a local SIM card and sign up for the Verizon international roaming package to receive my data on my Blackberry utilizing my Verizon SIM card.

2. Install a local SIM card in my Blackberry to use for making phone calls. Then, download my data only over wifi. If I do this, do I need to shut off data on the phone until I'm in the wifi zone and am using the phone on wifi? I wouldn't think so, since I would do this only if the local SIM card would not support data transmission.

Does anyone have any comments or other ideas?