Very few wireless carriers in the U.S. still offer unlimited data plans, especially after AT&T and Verizon stopped. There are T-Mobile and Sprint, but T-Mobile throttles your connection speed after a couple of gigabytes, and Sprint's plan costs $79 per month. A handful of contract-free carriers offer unlimited data, but you have to pay the full cost of your phone upfront, and none of them is as good as the iPhone or Galaxy Nexus.
Do you really need an unlimited plan, though? If you're avoiding these things -- or at least watching how much you use them -- you might not.
Streaming music
This isn't listening to music from your phone's internal storage or microSD card. Rather, this includes things like streaming tracks that you saved to Ubuntu One or Google Music ... or buying new albums from iTunes.
Pandora, Spotify, and other Internet radio apps also count. According to Marguerite Reardon of CNet's "Ask Maggie," streaming music uses about 40 MB per hour. So one eight-hour workday's worth of listening over 3G instead of Wi-Fi, and you've used up about a sixth of your $25 AT&T 2 GB monthly plan.
Streaming video
This one's an even bigger culprit. HD video uses up about 400 MB per hour, so a two-hour HD movie on Netflix uses almost half of a 2 GB plan's monthly allotment. Even low-quality streams on YouTube will eat up to 200 MB per hour, so if you're spending an hour on the train watching it to and from work that's a fifth of 2 GBs in one day.
Unless you're on an unlimited plan, streaming video on your smartphone (when you're not at a Wi-Fi hotspot) is like eating a rich dessert. It's definitely not something you should do all the time.
Browsing the Web
Marguerite notes that "graphically intense pages," or websites with a lot of pictures and ads on them, can use up to 2 MB. (The page that her advice column is on takes up 3.5 MB.) That's not a lot, but it adds up over a few hours of Web browsing.
Siri
Apple's new "personal assistant" also uploads everything you say to her straight to Apple. That means a voice file sent over the Internet, using your data plan. And as Zack Whittaker of ZDNet noted, users of the Siri-equipped iPhone 4S are eating up about twice the data of iPhone 4 users.
That may not all be because of Siri, but it's worth pointing out.
Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.
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