I have had only a regular cellphone and am thinking of getting a Droid smartphone. I have no idea how many megabytes a normal person uses on a smartphone. I would not be using it a lot and would not be downloading a lot of stuff, mostly internet surfing and email, someimes getting driving directions. I never use text messaging.
So they have $39.99 per month plus $1.99 per MB (for 450 minutes)
They also have $79.99 per month (for 450 minutes).
The $40 difference per month would equal 20 MB (all other things being equal). In real-life experience what does that mean?
I use my iPhone several times a day for casual web browsing – check the news while I’m waiting for a bus, maybe surf the Dope a little bit – and my usage last month came out to be 177 megabytes. It adds up VERY quickly.
It would depend on how they are converting the wavs. For instance an iPod mp4 uses less MB than a compariable mp3. You can get decent voice quality at low rates, as opposed to music which needs much more bandwidth.
But that doesn’t mean you can use high bandwidth. For instance, a book on tape at 128bps doesn’t sound any better than a book on tape at 32bps, but the size at 128bps is much greater.
So you have to figure out how they’re compressing the sound file
I just downloaded the webpage containing this thread. The HTML file, plus the folder holding all the graphics etc., came to more than 300kb.
The SDMB is, by today’s standards, a very low-bandwidth website, and yet you would only have to load 3 pages per day to go over 20Mb/month. Admittedly, things like images get stored in the browser’s cache, so they don’t need to be downloaded every time you open a new page, but the image and flash-intensive nature of modern websites means that even regular browsing adds up very quickly, as the usage figures given by posters above demonstrate.
An alternative to consider: SMS (text messaging) is usually cheaper than generic data and you can look up a lot of things from Google’s SMS service (text 46645 or “Googl”): Driving directions, local business listings, movie showtimes, sports scores, etc. You only get charged by your carrier for regular text messaging fees.
I’m not sure what your post is in reference to, but if you’re talking about regular voice calls, they get billed per-minute (or part of the 450 min plan), not by bandwidth.
I have the Verizon pay-as-you-go $1.99/MB data plan. I have a dull-normal cellphone on which I can’t (I don’t think) surf the web, but apps I download can use the Internet for their own purposes.
The only app I’ve downloaded so far that does this is a golf GPS app specific to Verizon cellphones that (it claims) downloads only 40KB from the Internet each time I start it up (basically it downloads the location of the front, center, and back of each of the 18 greens of each of the five golf courses nearest to where the phone’s GPS unit claims it’s located when I start the app). I’ve tracked my data usage over the three months or so since I’ve started using the app, and so far it’s always been well under 1MB/month.
On the other hand, if your phone has WiFi, then any data downloaded while connected to a WiFi hotspot doesn’t count towards your cell data limit. If you have a home wifi network, your phone is going to use quite a bit less data. But still nowhere near the 20MB/month limit.
Or we could point out that both of those things are true.
Whatever we might think of the prices charged for data, the fact is that websites have, over the past five years or so, gotten increasingly bloated. Lots of Flash video for both content and advertising, images galore, wads of Javascript and other code.
I have an iPhone. My provider has a variety of prepackaged plans for the iPhone, the smallest of which is 500 megabytes a month for $60 a month. You can also add a data upgrade to your existimng plan, the smallest of which is (I believe) $25 per month for the same 500 megabytes per month. This is web pages, videos, MMS messages, tethering my laptop, whatever. Phone calls and SMS come out of a different bucket. And WiFi data transfers aren’t charged at all by the cellphone provider.
Now, this is only within Canada, on my provider’s network. If I leave the country, data charges increase enormously, so much so that the iPhone turns data roaming off by default and adds a warning of the expense next to the on-button. I believe that I’ve seen rates of 3 cents per kilobyte ($30 per megabyte) for overseas data roaming, which means that that 300 kilobyte web page would cost $9.
Edit: just checked the listing for <pulls country out of air at random> Ghana: $3/minute voice; 75c per text message (SMS); data at 3c/kb with a minimum of 20 kb.
I have a Blackberry Bold that I use pretty heavily- lite web browsing, but I use GPS all the time, Facebook, and a chat program.
I tend to hover right below 30 MB a month and have never gone over that. Well, except for when I switched to the 50 MB international plan while I was in Peru. . . and ATT tried to claim that in 7 days, I used 129 MB.
Of course, looking at my last 2 years’ bills, ATT decided that was an error in their system and corrected it. Douchenozzles. (Can I call ATT douchenozzles in GQ? Because I just did).
But really: how much is the unlimited plan? If you plan on using the phone at all, just get that. It isn’t worth the time you’ll have to spend on the phone with the company straightening out going over. I somehow got some epic deal on my unlimited data (the folks in the ATT store always comment on it when I go in)- $25 a month. I know that’s really low, but just keep an eye out for specials.
I just checked my bill. I use around 100 MB in a month on my G1 Android phone, which is probably pretty similar to your proposed Droid. This is just casual surfing, emailing, etc.; no music or video downloads. I’d say get the unlimited plan…TRM
