Control your blackberry data usage

When you get a blackberry, you usually also get a Data Plan associated with it, this can be an unlimited data plan or a fixed data plan.

If you are getting a fixed data plan, you may be interested in an application which is able, to monitor and control your blackberry data usage. Otherwise you may end up with a big invoice because of the extra data you may have consumed.

I've an unlimited data plan on my blackberry, but after testing some of the network traffic monitor apps, I've found one that seems to be the best for me.

Here are some of its feature as listed in the blackberry app world:

• Shows traffic separated by radio and WiFi traffic:
  • Radio traffic in, out and total today and this month
  • WiFi traffic in, out and total today and this month
• Differentiates between traffic sent out and received.
• Billing setup
  • Over-usage alarm (de)activation
  • First day of month of your telephone bill (this helps to calculate charges within a billing cycle)
  • Packages traffic (i.e. you have a 10 MB BlackBerry® Data Plan)
  • Price per KB thereafter (i.e. traffic charges when you use more than 10 MB of your data plan)
  • Maximum traffic fee (i.e. if you are OK to spend $10 on traffic more per month, you will get a notification when your monthly traffic is over $10)
• Global over-usage notification
  • Homescreen notification icon: You will now see an ?over-usage? icon in your BlackBerry® homescreen, you are over your monthly traffic maximum.
  • Global dialog notification: Whatever you are using right now and you exceed the traffic limit, a dialog will pop up and show a notification about traffic ?over-usage?.
• Auto starts network tracking on device reset and runs in light-weight mode in background.

It really consumes very little resources of the phone, both processing cycles and battery juice, so if you have a limited data plan associated with your blackberry, and you are a little concerned about how many megs you are using, you may want to test blackberry Network Traffic Control app. It is also important to say that it is free.