iPhone newbie question

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MaxTek's picture
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Joined: Dec 20 2003 - 10:38
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iPhone newbie question

Can someone tell me what to avoid in using the iPhone 3G S to avoid going over my data usage for the month? What are the killers? Is it Google Maps, Surfing the net, checking mail, downloading from the App Store? My question pertains to using 3G not wifi.

Right now I am guessing it is Google Maps and downloading new apps from the App Store ON the iPhone itself.

Any help is very appreciated. Thanks.

MaxTek

eeun's picture
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Joined: Dec 19 2003 - 17:34
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I was on 3G with my eeepc las

I was on 3G with my eeepc last year, with a pathetic 1GB limit.

I avoided image-heavy sites for the most part, and of course went nowhere near any audio or video streaming. I know I did at least a couple Google image searches, and broke down to watch one YouTube video.

Email and forum browsing were pretty much it, yet I still managed to go over the limit. Mind you, I was online a fair amount.

MaxTek's picture
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Re: I was on 3G with my eeepc las

I was on 3G with my eeepc last year, with a pathetic 1GB limit.

I avoided image-heavy sites for the most part, and of course went nowhere near any audio or video streaming. I know I did at least a couple Google image searches, and broke down to watch one YouTube video.

Email and forum browsing were pretty much it, yet I still managed to go over the limit. Mind you, I was online a fair amount.

Why is there an option to turn off 3G on the iPhone? Should I turn it off since I am ALSO disapointed with the battery life (OS 4.0.1)?

What about notifications? Turn them off?

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Re: I was on 3G with my eeepc las

Why is there an option to turn off 3G on the iPhone? Should I turn it off since I am ALSO disapointed with the battery life (OS 4.0.1)?

What about notifications? Turn them off?

In some areas, 3G is flaky so turning it off (switching back to EDGE) can help give you a more stable, albeit slower, connection. Turning off 3G won't help battery life by any appreciable amount.

Turning off push mail and setting your mailboxes to only check for new messages on demand will use up the least amount of data. Every time the phone checks for mail automatically, or keeps a connection open to receive push messages, uses some data -- granted, it's not a lot for each individual mailbox poll, but if you compound that every 10 minutes (or whatever you have the polling cycle set to) over the course of a whole month, that's a few MB.

Here's a good example of what real-world mobile data usage looks like. While that page refers to the iPad, usage statistics should be relevant for the iPhone as well since both devices have to download the same amount of data in order to render a Web page, send an e-mail, etc. (In other words, just because the iPhone is physically smaller doesn't mean it'll consume less data to do the same tasks.)

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