I’m not a novice, and I’m certainly not the “typical” iphone user; however, it has been my first week with one, so I could be slated into the “beginner” category if you want to be all particular about it. For me, I decided against the dataplan that Rogers was pushing on their customers, and as mentioned before, I had to undergo some pressure to bend to their wills and pick up the dataplan before they would ship me a phone without one. Ever since the phone has arrived I’ve been undergoing a bit of a social experiment with it. Do I really need to use the 3G/Edge technology while I’m out and about, or would wifi suffice? Could an average user survive both technologically and economically without a data plan?
The first thing I had to do was make sure that I was able to guarantee that the internet was not being accessed mistakenly or in error while I was showing off the phone, or using it as a phone. I decided the best way to do this was to place all the internet applications into its own window. On a couple of occasions while I was messing around familiarizing myself with the phone, I hit the email button, incurring a couple of KB damage to my pocket book. In all honesty it’s turned into a bit of a game for me. I think I’ll title it “Overcoming the Greed.”
Lesson Learned
3G is blazingly fast, so it’s really simple to lose a couple dozen KBs of data in an error. So, to over come the flood gates of hell being leashed upon me, I decided I’d turn off 3G entirely because EDGE was a lot slower. I’d much prefer the trickle of hell than the flood gates, and I’m sure most would agree with me. So, outside of a couple first day blunders, I managed to keep my usage rates down; however, I started to notice that I was still incurring usage, despite abandoning use of any application outside of my wifi connections. Trust me, I’ve been super anal about it, I’d know if I was using something when I shouldn’t be. Some how I’ve managed to use 13.0 KB up and 65.0 KB down.
Me, a user full aware of the difference between wireless internet at home and a wireless internet abroad has managed to incur some data usage. I’ve spent a great deal of my time explaining to interested friends and family the differences between the two, but, I’ve yet to feel comfortable with them “understanding” what it meant fully. At this point, I’d have to recommend against getting an iPhone without a dataplan, unless of course, you’re tech savvy and fully grasp the differences. For me, I might get charged an extra five bucks, for the facebook creepers, they would likely get charged an extra fifty bucks. Don’t do it!
Now, if apple would give us the ability to shut off 3G/EDGE entirely it would be a whole new outcome for me. While I understand the motivation behind not providing the “feature”, I still have a hard time understanding why they would remove the option entirely. It’s pretty simple, place an on/off switch beneath the 3G on/off switch and I, along with many other Canadians, would be estatic.
