Most people like to drop the Blackberry devices and
switch to an Android or iOS device, because of their utility and better battery
life. What more, Google Play and Apple store has close to 1million apps each, while the BlackBerry has a meagre 100,000 apps.
But, why do people still stick to BlackBerry in this part
of the world? I will give you one concrete reason, data subscription is pretty
expensive infact its a rip-off. Subcribers pays as high as $20/N3000 for a meagre 1gigabytes worth of data.
The Android and iOS are better devices but
their utility comes with a price of heavy data consumption. An
average user may use up to 1gig in a week.
How to Control Heavy Data Consumption on Android
1. Go to Settings => Wireless&Networks => Mobile Networks, untick Data Enabled or Use Packet Data.
By doing this your Android device will not access the internet withount your permission.
2. Also Go to Settings => Account Sync => Disable Background Data.
This will stop auto-updates that heavily consumes your data plan.
3. Another one, is that leaving too many apps that requires internet open will drain your data.
Go to Settings => Applications => Manage Apps => Click on a running app that you dont need => Force Stop or you may uninstall if you dont need the application.
Switch to lightweight browsers like Opera Mini, UC Browser or Chrome Beta.
After applying this settings, compare the way data bundle is being depleted before the saved changes. You will notice a significant reduction of data consumption.
How to Control heavy Data Consumption on iOS
Knowing exactly the apps that are consuming your data on iOS requires a little sniffing around. On these devices, you may not be able to exactly pinpoint the apps that are using up you data. Unless, your device has been jailbroken. If your device has been jailbroken grab the iNetUsgae at $2 from Cydia and monitor your data usage breakdown. If your device has not been jailbroken you to investigate and track down the guilty apps. Try these:
1. Checkout the Apps that Use the Most Batterry
If an app is draining your battery, the chances are that, the app is eating up your data plan. There are apps that runs in the background that sucks battery. Apps running in the background on iOS can only do few. It is normal to think that download files to be the guilty party, iOS allows background downloading for a short amount of time. Application privileges is cut off in ten minutes if the application is not opened.
You will sure run into wasted data when you leave a music or location aware app opened in the background. Music app may play indefinitely, when streaming music you will use a lot of data simply by forgetting to stop playback.
Location aware apps use GPS that require data downloads, relevant to that particular GPS. Though it is unlikely that they keep grabbing new data, you want to be sure that the app is not accessing your location without your permission.
2. Use a Data Monitoring App
Go to Settings => Tap the General Headings => Network => Cellular Data.
This will report the total amount of data consumed by the device. Third party apps can also provide same information WiFi iPads and iPods touch. Though, this may not unmask the app causing the trouble, but it will tell you when a lot of data was used. The date and time information can be use to track down what you were doing when large amount of data was consumed. This is not a definite method but it will narrow the guilty app.
3. Call Your Service Providers
From my experience curve, its not everytime that a heavy data consumption is your fault. Sometimes it may be an error from the high-end of your service provider. So, don't just assume its your fault, call the customer care service of your service provider. Ask them to check if your data usage cummulates to your present balance or may be there is a drop in your data balance.
Last Words
I hope this information helps you to solve your Android and iOS data issues.
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