Legal Research

Things I learned about my HTC Desire on Holiday

By scott

I have just returned from a 12 day holiday in Spain ? my first with my HTC Desire, and I learned a few things that, if you own one, you should be aware of if you plan to data roam with one.

1) Unless it is hidden somewhere, you do not seem to have a function ? such as that found on the iPhone where you can measure your data usage ? nor reset it, so that you can easily monitor it from your phone when abroad, so that you know exactly how much data (and therefore associated cost) you are consuming/using. This is more of a pain that I imagined it would be. A win for the iPhone.

2) The problem with having apps that can run in the background, is that they will if you either don’t disable them ? not as easy as you’d imagine; I created a ’scene’ [For those not familiar with HTC phones, it is kind of like a separate user profile] for my holiday to select specific apps I’d want/need for holiday ?this didn’t stop Messenger opening by itself in the background, even though I had not added it to this specific ’scene’.

3) Make sure that you have unticked ‘Enable always on mobile data’ in the settings on your phone, if you have it switched on. I had ?albeit ? stupidly forgotten about this. The result? I bought a T-Mobile data add on for the trip of 50MB for £10 [which is their suggested ‘monthly’ usage tariff: you could by daily and weekly smaller amounts]. I checked by gmail once, uploaded one pic to facebook, checked twitter twice, checked into Foursquare twice, and yet in less than 48hours T-Mobile told me I’d used up my data allowance. The reason was that the BBC app, Messenger, and various other things on the phone were not only happily loading and running themselves in the background, but they were also merely downloading an updates and rechecking for updates in the background too, using up my data allowance in the process. Had I still been on 02, with their £3 per mb charges up to a max monthly charge of £40 for using 50MB, I would have seriously been out of pocket. A win for T-Mobile

4) Once I had turned off ‘Enable always on mobile data’, and also when to only turning on data roaming at all when I actually needed it ? everything worked a treat.

Conclusion

The HTC Desire is not as straightforward as the iPhone is to make yourself ’safe’ from a roaming standpoint or to monitor your data usage. But if you’re going to make mistakes it pays not to be on O2 when you do them. Hat’s off to T-Mobile.

Full post as published by Information Overload on September 16, 2010 (boomark / email).