Out of curiousity today, I took a look at my AT&T Wireless bill in detail, specifically my data usage. I was interested to see what my general usage pattern is, and to have a figure in my head if the word 'cap' ever came up. I started by looking up January as that was when I had my Fuze, and I imagined it would be much higher. The total used was 1217MB or 1.2GB. Next I looks up March, by which time I had my Bold, and found it was up to nearly 2.5GB. Wow! Finally, I looked at last month and it was a paltry 97MB. How could that be? I have unlimited mobile data, so I wasn't concerned from a price standpoint, but I was baffled by how I came to be using about 5% of my previous data volumes- was my email not pulling at home? Had I stopped surfing the web? Well, I figured out what the issue was. The first part is why my usage was so high in March: I was using Podtrapper to regularly download podcasts on my Bold to watch at work during lunch. So, now that I have delegated that task to my iPod Touch, its a big difference. The second solution was so simple I was almost embarrased when I figured out what it was: WiFi! The WiFi management on Blackberry is so efficient that I can (and do) leave it on all the time and it has no impact on my battery life. In fact, as you can see here, I would even go as far as to say that while on WiFi my battery lasts longer than on 3G. So while I am at home my Bold is using my WiFi signal, rather than the 3G, which has had several benefits: longer battery life, faster connections, and apparently a steep drop in my AT&T data consumption.
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