Some people in the US are lucky enough to be on unlimited data plans, but most phone-based Internet users pay for the data they use. "3G Watchdog" is perfect for helping anyone with a data quota track how much of their 3G data they are chewing up as the days go by.
My data plan with Vodafone NZ is 250MB / month and each additional MB is 10 cents. That means the second 250MB (and each subsequent 250MB) is $25. I'm happy to use roughly double my data quota before I start to get sweaty palms. That's about 20MB / day and usually more than adequate for Google sync and all the web browsing I do away from the home or office Wi-Fi.
3G Watchdog is most useful when I'm over my quota. Vodafone's BAL query via txt to 777 will tell me how much of my data quota I have left, but makes no attempt to count the data once I'm over. It might be 1MB or 100GB....without 3G Watchdog, I'd be left guessing.
The most recent versions allow you to set the amount of data for your quota, the period of the quota - a day, a week, a month - and the day of the month the period starts. It then counts how much data you have sent and received since the start of the latest period. It won't be aware of data you used prior to the first time you ran the app, but it does seem to be able to add up increments after the first run even if you don't run 3G Watchdog all the time.
You can set it to only appear in the notifications bar when you aren't on a Wi-Fi connection. It doesn't count data used over anything other than 2G/3G.
You can also set the threshold for 3G Watchdog to begin warning you about how much data you have been using. My threshold is set to 75%. After that, I get regular warnings about the progress of my usage. When you hit your threshold, a pop-up appears letting you know you're now paying extra for any network usage.
3G Watchdog is free. At that price, I don't see how anyone on a data quota can afford to be without it.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for deciding to share your thoughts here. In commenting on this blog, you can express any opinion you like, though any opinion expressed should make some attempt to be consistent with verifiable reality. Say what you like, confident that I won't delete any comments that are polite and respectful of me and others who may comment here. Civility aside, SPAM comments will be deleted if only because they are usually far too long and selling rubbish anyway. (Comments on posts older than 30 days are moderated. I'll approve them as soon as I can.)