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Perihelion

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 4, 2010
135
7
I swapped my HTC Hero running Android for my new iPhone 4. Love the phone and all its features but I'm finding that I'm burning through WAY more data than I did on the Hero. I'm not sure yet if the phone itself is just chatty on data behind the scenes checking for new emaisl and such or if I'm consuming more data because the OS and apps are condusive to more data consumption in less time or with less effort. As a comparison, I used about 120mb of data a month on the Hero including email, facebook, light browsing, weather, and stock updates. Same usage pattern on the iPhone but I've burned through 125mb in a week. Your thoughts?
 

Daveoc64

macrumors 601
Jan 16, 2008
4,074
92
Bristol, UK
Other than using the phone a little more than you might otherwise have done (it's a new "toy" after all), the iPhone 4's retina display causes many apps to download larger images and as such more data will be used compared to other phones doing the same thing.
 

Krevnik

macrumors 601
Sep 8, 2003
4,100
1,309
5MB isn't a ton of flux. That's maybe a few image heavy pages. Or even 2 songs over Pandora.
 

MisterDisney

macrumors 6502a
Jun 20, 2010
550
5
Not really enough data to matter. Unless you fell for the 200MB plan, you'll be fine. I've had an iPhone 4 since launch and just picked up a Samsung Epic as a back-up phone line (turns out Sprint actually works where I live, now (where AT&T doesn't).. Should be interesting to see how the data usage compares after the first month.
 

Perihelion

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 4, 2010
135
7
5MB isn't a ton of flux. That's maybe a few image heavy pages. Or even 2 songs over Pandora.

Its not just 5mb difference, that's a month compared to a week of usage...point taken about the "new toy" syndrome though.
 

Krevnik

macrumors 601
Sep 8, 2003
4,100
1,309
Okay, 4 times the data is more of a concern, but there is wifi vs 3G to consider too. If you have used one near a wifi spot more than the other it will greatly influence the billed data use.

Although in general, it's hard to tell you what you see is normal or not without being fairly invasive and getting a complete picture of your usage, where it happens and what it is.
 

m3coolpix

macrumors 6502a
Dec 24, 2007
721
3
Besides 'new toy' syndrome, are you browsing the iPhone's built in iTunes app and/or the App Store much? :D

And....most of the 3rd party apps (especially those with ads, free or not) do a lot of 'phoning around/home' while you are running them.
 

Carlanga

macrumors 604
Nov 5, 2009
7,132
1,409
prob. using internet enabled apps that you didn't have before in android = more data usage. Especially downloading/trying out/removing/keeping new apps to test the apps you want at the end will surely increase more your usage at the beginning of your ownership.
 

Savor

Suspended
Jun 18, 2010
3,742
918
Use Opera Mini to save data usage.

It isn't as nice as Safari on iPhone and you have to zoom alot, but it compresses the sites that you can save up to 90% as they claim. So what might be 200MB on Safari would be like 2GB on Opera Mini. I am using it now since I went over my 200MB limit a few times. At home, I use WiFi and Safari. Outside the house, I just use Edge and Opera Mini.
 

Irish Rose

macrumors 65816
May 29, 2010
1,068
1
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/532.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.5 Mobile/8B117 Safari/6531.22.7)

An Android device is no less data hungry than the iPhone. As a matter of fact, I can easily see an Android user consuming more data in one month than an iPhone user would.
 
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