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-Eden

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 27, 2010
72
0
How much data will iMessage use? Will it use as much data as BBM if you were to put them beside eachother? I currently don't use a data plan for my iPhone 4 but seeing as iMessage has features I want, I am willing to switch to a data plan.
 

Intell

macrumors P6
Jan 24, 2010
18,955
509
Inside
Excluding pictures, videos, and audio. Its very little. Probably only a few KB per message or about as much as an average push notification.
 

Slevin

macrumors 6502
Jul 1, 2007
303
29
New York
How much data will iMessage use? Will it use as much data as BBM if you were to put them beside eachother? I currently don't use a data plan for my iPhone 4 but seeing as iMessage has features I want, I am willing to switch to a data plan.

It'll be free if you have a data plan
 

-Eden

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 27, 2010
72
0
Thanks for the reply guys!

How do you have an iPhone without a data plan?

I had a Blackberry 9700 before, and I decided I wanted an iPhone, so I went to Apple and bought it full price.
 

rodman109110

macrumors 6502
Jun 7, 2007
310
0
It'll be free if you have a data plan

Thats not his question. He wants to know how much data it uses so that he can, I assume, choose what data plan he wants.

-Eden said:
I had a Blackberry 9700 before, and I decided I wanted an iPhone, so I went to Apple and bought it full price.

Are you on AT&T? I thought that they just add a data plan automatically to smartphone users since they can tell some how what phone you use and its a required charge for smart phone users.
 

Carlanga

macrumors 604
Nov 5, 2009
7,132
1,409
I would say from 1-10kb for normal txt, pics would be the size of the pic plus a few kbs more
 

-Eden

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 27, 2010
72
0
Are you on AT&T? I thought that they just add a data plan automatically to smartphone users since they can tell some how what phone you use and its a required charge for smart phone users.
I'm on Rogers in Canada, so I guess I'm lucky :).
I would say from 1-10kb for normal txt, pics would be the size of the pic plus a few kbs more

Is that the size of a normal SMS? I actually don't know =.= .
 

dccorona

macrumors 68020
Jun 12, 2008
2,033
1
Ahhh...I'm not quite sure on my conversions. Someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong

But a character in ASCII is 1 byte (8 bits)

Basically, that means take the length of your message in characters (including spaces), and that is the number of bytes your message will be. 1000 of those in a kb, 1,000,000 in a mb, and 1,000,000,000 in a gb

So on a 250mb plan on AT&T, you can send 250 million characters through iMessage (or really send and receive) without going over, assuming you don't use any other data (which you will)
 

bohbot16

macrumors 6502a
Mar 22, 2009
674
10
1 Byte = 8 bits
1 KB = 2^10 B, or 1024 Bytes
1 MB = 2^10 KB, or 1024 KB, or 1048576 Bytes
 
Last edited:

haydn!

macrumors 65816
Nov 10, 2008
1,270
1,836
UK
A stand 160 character SMS is around 140 bytes. You can send around 7,500 SMS messages with an average 160 character length with just 1MB of data.

In short, the amount of data use for your average texter will be un-noticable.
 

pacohaas

macrumors 6502a
Jan 24, 2006
516
3
In short, the amount of data use for your average texter will be un-noticable.

Photos and videos would be interesting to see some data though. I know when you send a photo via e-mail it asks if you want to resize and it shows you the filesizes as options. There doesn't appear to be that option when iMessaging, so does Apple just choose a size for you? If not, then the original could be quite large. If so, what size do they choose? I had a friend iMessage me from his iPhone 4 and then saved the file to my Photo Albums and it's 1.76MB 2592x1936!

Apple needs to provide an option to "not use 3G for data", and in those cases I would be happy with it uses 1 of my 200 SMS messages instead.
 
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