Buying an Int'l Sim card in NY for use in Europe.

Unless your Blackberry is unlocked you will need to buy a cheap unlocked phone. YOu can get one for about $20. Or, and I think better, if you have AT&T or T-Mobile get their European calling plan. T-Mobile is about 20 cents a minute with unlimited data. The Sim cards you buy wont be cheaper than that.

As James said, you'll need an unlocked phone to use a different sim card. I don't have experience with net2phone so I can't specifically comment on them, but I know in general you should be able to set things up ahead of time. Sometimes that involves mailing you a sim though, so I'm not sure if you have time for that in two weeks. To add to the above comment - T-Mobile's plan looks fairly cheap (since it includes data) but AT&T's world plan is not. I would recommend using a local sim card in an unlocked phone any day over AT&T if you are using your phone for anything other than emergencies. For example, I had a plan in Italy that for for 1€ a week I could make calls to the US for 12 cents/minute. I was paying $1/minute with AT&T my first trip. (They may have lowered prices by now but I still think local sim cards are usually cheaper).

The Tmobile deal kills verizon and ATandT on call charges at a. mere 20c a min and free data. That said a local SIM is half that and as low as 5c.
The. free data is however 2g, very slow,fine for email. Voip would be unsuable.
A fair chunk of high speed data 500mb comes in at $50, which is about what the others want.
A local SIM should give that for $7.50/
They have doubled the data to 1GB.
AT and T is $120 for 1GB
They are charging $10 for thier SIM though, and theres tax and a fee too.
The taxes come in at 6-28% of the package price.

My experience is pretty limited. I purchased one of those sim cards and a cheap unlocked phone once from this company
http://www.telestial.com/sim_regional.php?ID=EU Turns out it was a VOIP deal. Making phone calls required you to dial the number and then hang up and wait for the phone to ring back. Never worked too good and I never used all the minutes I had to buy. Then I purchased a pay as you go sim in Budapest but it really wasn't worth the trouble either. I preferred the convenience of pulling out my familiar phone and making a call when I wanted and having all my email and texts at hand on my regular phone number. For long winded calls I use the T-Mobile WIFI Calling feature my phone came with. Costs nothing to call home but I have to have WIFI. Even that is simple. If the feature is turned on and if I have a WIFI single it just routes my calls through it automatically. I never notice the difference. My T-Mobile has worked from South Africa to the mountains of Honduras to the mountains of Bulgaria to London, Israel, and Red Square in Russia. Never had a problem. But i pay a little more i guess for the easy life.

I've bought several phones and SIM cards over the years. There are so many competing companies in Europe that it's better and cheaper to just buy it when you get there. You can buy one in the airport, phone kiosks are about as common as ATM's, or downtown in a department store, kiosk in a mall, or dedicated phone (various companies) store. I think it will be cheaper and easier to buy a phone there - plus you don't have to worry about whatever you bought in the states not working and being dead weight on your trip.