These days, smartphones can do a lot of the things your computer can do. You can browse the web, send emails, use third-party applications, watch movies, listen to music, check your social networks… the list goes on and on.
However, even though your smartphone can do all of these things, it is important to remember that doing many of these things, especially streaming video or music on the web, uses a high amount of data, so it’s not always best to do things in the same way as you would use your computer at work or home.
Web browsing and emails
Whether it be an iPhone, BlackBerry, Android or other smartphone, they can pretty much do both web browsing and email. And what’s better, they can do them pretty well. In fact, many of us would be lost without the ability to send and receive emails or browse the web on our smartphones. What’s good to remember, though, is that while you can do these things, there are a couple of things to consider when browsing or emailing using your cellular network. When it comes to emails, they don’t tend to use a whole lot of data, and generally a text-based email only uses a few kB. However, if you are sending an receiving emails with large attachments, such as large images or other files, and you are viewing them on your smartphone, you will have used a lot more of your data allowance. But I have a 500MB per month allowance, surely that’s enough! Indeed, it’s a fair amount of data, but if you are downloading large attachments of around 10MB you wouldn’t have to do it more than a few times to eat up a large chunk of your monthly allowance. Luckily web browsing doesn’t generally use a lot of data, but if you’re viewing pages with lots of images you would go through your allowance much more quickly.
Streaming music and video
One of the main features of the latest smartphones is their ability to watch or listen to video and music on the device. While many of us are used to watching video clips on YouTube, BBC iPlayer and by other means it’s not always a good idea to do this too frequently while on your smartphone while using a cellular network. First of all, it is still much slower than using a Wi-Fi internet connection, and you’ll use up a lot of data, especially while streaming video. Alternatively, you can usually connect your smartphone to a Wi-Fi internet connection which will let you stream, download, watch, listen– as much as you like, without using any of your monthly allowance. Plus, you’ll generally be able to do this much more quickly this way too.
Applications
Many smartphone applications (or apps, for short) use your data connection to work. These include social networking apps such as Facebook or Twitter, some games, local services apps like Google Maps or Foursquare, and many more. In order for them to function they sometimes have to send and/or receive information from the internet. Luckily, most of the time this doesn’t use up a lot of data, and is similar to web browsing in terms of amount of usage. However, there are still a couple of things to consider when it comes to apps. First of all, if the app itself takes up a lot of storage on your phone, it’ll use up a lot of data to download. Some apps, especially games, can be several hundred megabytes in size, and we’d recommend that if an app is over 10MB, download it over a Wi-Fi connection. This way you won’t have to wait as long for it to download, and you will save your data allowance too. Secondly, if an app streams music or video, it’ll use up more data. This is exactly the same sort of usage we described earlier, so if you do intend on streaming a lot, we’d recommend limiting your usage, or using Wi-Fi.
Summary
When it comes to data usage, it’s really a case of just making the right decisions, and bearing in mind that if you’re in a place with a Wi-Fi connection, connecting to it will save you time and your data allowance! Also, if you are a heavy user, you could always consider increasing your data allowance to allow you to use your smartphone without worrying about going over your limit.
If you have any questions regarding your data usage, please feel free to call us on 0131 557 8300
