Explain this Iphone offer to me!

[BottleOfRum]

I've finally decided to come out of the stone age and get myself an Iphone.

I have found a deal I'm quite happy with here. Its an Iphone 4 for £99 upfront, then £30 a month for the phone - 5000 texts and 300minutes. Which is plenty for me. But the thing I will mostly use my Iphone for is internet browsing (facebook, mumsnet etc), and it says you get 500MB internet allowance - does anyone know how many hours of browsing this would equate to? I really am so clueless, and would appreciate any help!!

a web page is about 50kb so thats over 10,000 pages which is a HUGE amount. Downloading one song is about 2-4mb i think and a film would be about 70mb so it seems plenty!

I have had my iphone a year now and never gone over the 500mb despite using it everyday over and over again!

"a web page is about 50kb so thats over 10,000 pages which is a HUGE amount."

The HTML for this page might be about 50k but in total it pulls in over 550k worth of files (images, javascript files, stylesheets etc.)

So that would put that limit at less than 1000 pages, 30 a day for a month. But then again if you repeatedly visit the same page you download less as the gadget will keep a hold of some of the files a page needs.

So it is hard to judge, but a web page will on average be much bigger than 50kb.

"one song is about 2-4mb"

A "normal" song from iTunes ranges from about 5mb to 10mb in size.

"a film would be about 70mb"

Films on iTunes are about 2gb, you couldn't even download one on that mobile allowance. However that's not the sort of thing you'd want to be doing when you're out and about, you'd download that when at home and on a WIFI connection.

"I have had my iphone a year now and never gone over the 500mb despite using it everyday over and over again!"

That's the key point though. It's one thing to say "well worst case you might be looking at less than 1000 web pages a month" but what's really useful is how most people find that limit in practice given their normal online habits.

Does anyone find that 500mb isn't enough?

And if so what are they doing to need more capacity?

Well to put it into perspective, I hammer my iphone and even have it set up to automatically collect emails from work.

According to the stats on the phone, I have used 700MB since July.

The 500MB allowance you get is for mobile browsing only and not what you'd use whilst using wifi at home, friends or hotspots.

I do try to use Wifi whereever I can because of the speed. 3G is slow & patchy at best.

Hope that helps.

I think the 500MB limit will only really be an issue if you use it to download music & view videos (eg youtube) whilst you are out & about.

Ah, well, here is the thing, I don't have internet at home , so I don't have a WIFI thing to connect to, so 500MB would have to cover my entire monthly usage. And yes, I can imagine myself using it to look at videos in youtube etc, so I'm going to assume its probably not enough for me, just to be on the safe side.

I'll try and find myself another deal, thanks very much.

Having an iPhone without having an internet connection at home might actually be quite tricky.

For a start I don't think they give you a disk with iTunes on any more, you're expected to download it from somewhere.

And you'll need iTunes to activate the phone, and I "think" iTunes needs to be connected to the internet to do that activation...