Data Plans

ATT announced that they are changing their data plans and will no longer offer unlimited data plans.  Those of us who have them won’t give them up, but new contracts will have to choose between a $15/month plan where you get 200 MB of data or a $25/month plan that gives you 2G.  If you use more than 2G you pay $10 for each additional G.  ATT says most of their customers use less than 1G per month. 

I looked at my usage and I do use less than 1G per month.  In the winter months I even used less than 200MB.   But in the last 2 months I used more than 200MB and last November my usage doubled.  Must be my MLB app where I can stream baseball games. 

Consumer Reports says most of us will save money.

The average iPhone user should pay the same or less for service under the new data plans announced by AT&T. The new plans replace a $30-a-month flat fee for unlimited data service with plans that start at $15 per month for a limited amount of data.

The reason: Most iPhone users typically use less data per month than the amounts that would trigger a $30-plus bill under the new pricing schemes.

The average iPhone user consumes 273 MB of data per month, according to the unique data on iPhone usage reported a few months ago by colleague Jeff Blyskal. More than half of owners use less than 200 MB per month, that data reveals. The new $15 iPhone plan provides 200 MB per month, and so would cut data costs in half for the majority of iPhone owners.

I guess I’m about average.  And I suppose saving $5.00 per month would be a good thing.  But why do I think there’s a catch in here somewhere?

Oh, here it is:

In addition, the new plans come just days away from the expected launch of a new iPhone operating system, iPhone 4.0, that might change data usage. The new OS is expected to be on the new iPhone that will be announced on Monday and made available to all iPhones sometime next month, and to all iPads later in the year. iPhone 4.0 may encourage greater data use by, among other features, allowing iPhones and iPads to multitask. So where at present the devices generally consume data from only one app at a time, the 4.0 upgrade may allow them to draw simultaneously from several.

Small Solutions?

All of the discussion this week about digital publishing and paperbacks vs. hardbacks vs. Kindle just keeps running through my mind making me wonder whether to buy a Kindle or an iPad and use the Kindle app. I even considered downloading the Kindle app to my iphone and trying it out to see what it was like. One of my colleagues at work did that last year and she loves it.

Isn’t it too small to enjoy, I wondered? She says she doesn’t have a problem with the smallness. She just likes the portability and the fact that she didn’t have to buy another device. I think I would find it too small.

I was, however, interested to read a piece that Howard Hill wrote in this week’s Guardian about how his iphone helps him to read. Howard is dyslexic.

I'm reasonably well read but I read slowly; books have always been a struggle. I read one sentence, which sparks a thought, maybe causing my eyes to flicker, and I lose my place.

Then he bought an iphone and downloaded an app that let’s you read classic books online. He realized he hadn’t read many of them so he chose one at random. When I read he chose “The Count of Monte Cristo” I thought “wow, that’s a pretty long book to choose for your first try.” I was amazed that he finished it

The first title I selected was The Count of Monte Cristo. I raced through this on my iPhone in just over a week, my wife asking why I was continually playing with my iPhone. When I'd finished I enjoyed the story so much that I went to buy a copy for a friend. In the bookshop I was amazed. It was more than 1,000 pages! Had I been presented with the book in this form I would never have read it. It would have been too much like climbing a mountain.

He analyzes why:

So why I had found it easier to read from my iPhone? First, an ordinary page of text is split into about four pages. The spacing seems generous and because of this I don't get lost on the page. Second, the handset's brightness makes it easier to take in words. "Many dyslexics have problems with 'crowding', where they're distracted by the words surrounding the word they're trying to read," says John Stein, Professor of Neuroscience at Oxford University and chair of the Dyslexia Research Trust. "When reading text on a small phone, you're reducing the crowding effect."

I’d like to see some real research into this.