How much is 500MB?

[CharmQuark]

In terms of data allowance on a phone?
I am looking for a cheap phone and deal for DS, he needs a few calls, lots of text, to be able to store some music and maybe download some, and use his phone occasionally for reference - e.g if lost when out and about.

But not lots of internet usage.

would this be good?

500MB is not much - I have an allowance of 1GB and it lasts me about two weeks - all I do with it is MN and Facebook.

I have 500mb on my phone (pay and go £10 a month 02) and get nowhere near using it. That said I don't facebook on my phone and don't download music. If I'm out I always connect to the free wifi if its available.

To a certain extent it depends how old he is and what sort of phone deals his friends have - it's no good him (and you) saying he wont use it a lot for the internet because when you're young peer pressure counts for a lot and if all his friends are able to use their phones for whatever it is they do he'll want to too. My advice would be -if you (he) can afford the extra go for it.

If it's any help my younger brother has a 1GB allowance, uses free wifi connections whenever he can and gets close to using it each month. I know that he's always accessing things like sports news and is continually on facebook, whatsapp and the like - he hardly ever uses his phone to make a call so the 150 minutes or whatever he gets free is of no great value.

Oh, yes, free wi fi, I hadn't thought of that.

He uses his laptop at home for internet access, as far as I can see his friends don't use internet much when out and about. They are not a gadget-obsessed bunch, all prefer pretty basic phones rather than mugger-magnets.

He is almost 13.

He might occasionally want to download music - but presumably (you can see I am very ignorant) you can put music on your phone from your computer without using data?

You can always stick a parental control app on there and restrict daily or monthly usage to prevent exceeding the limits. Daily limiting is especially good as he'll get an idea of how much is too much in a day and probably get better at managing it himself.

It's not much, my teenager gets through 1.5 gb a month which is 3 times 500mb

I rarely get close to 500mb but my phone defaults to wifi where available and we can use BT hotspots when out and about so there's often free wifi available (drains battery though).

I use it for mumsnet, reddit, news, twitter, Facebook, email. Not much streaming of music & video.

Make sure you set up apps to only update over wifi. That's a massive data suck.

Giffgaff £12 pm sim only unlimited data? You can get pretty cheap smart phones on Amazon.

I have an iPhone and use less than 500 a month - though was talked into a larger allowance. I am on it virtually all the time, but use wifi at home and do more browsing than downloading.

What about something like this (the Small Plan might fit his requirements)?

That's ace, Optimist - an many thanks everyone for all the tips. llvery useful.

Especially things like parental controls and setting limits and only allowing updates on Wi-Fi.

Working out how to do that will keep me busy for weeks

(It's me by the way - I was on an extended name change but went off it)

We have the Tesco mobile plan for DD - you can set a cap - so she currently cannot go more than £2.50 beyond her monthly tariff - she used it one month - but had not understood she was not using wifi properly.

According to the likes of Curry's, the SI unit of data quantity is now the "song". I find this very confusing, since I have about 350,000 files on my server and not one of them is a song, even though it includes about 23 Gb of music.