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I have been curious about Blackberry data useage for a while. The Blackberry contracts (BIS/BES) are around R65/month and include unlimited data for on-device browsing, email, IM, etc. I do a fair amount of browsing on my Blackberry (rather than my Nokia) largely because of the data. I have a small (30 Meg) data bundle on the Nokia and I regularly go over the limit. Not difficult to do given that some web pages (even on the mobile device) take a few hundred K, making it every easy to use a Meg or two reading just a few sites.

The other factor is that Blackberry is said to use a fair degree of compression through the use of their own data proxies and their own services. So how much value for money do I really get out of the Blackberry service?

I looked around for a tool to monitor the useage, and came across a few, but only one seemed as though it would be up to the task, so I downloaded “David” from the blackberry appstore. It is a 60 day trial version, but is more than adequate for monitoring a few days useage.

After 2 days, here is how it’s looking :

Two days useage +- 18 Meg (and after the 1st day it was around 9 Meg).

That includes Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, downloading some apps, browsing the net, BB Messenger etc. I am really impressed with the relatively low data useage given my patterns of useage. Anyhow, some very quick sums and it would be around 270 megabytes of data per month. For the price paid for the BIS/BES useage, that is really good value for money.

I’m probably an outlier on useage, though perhaps not in the top 2% of users. Still, for anybody looking to make decent useage of their mobile device and not to have to worry about crazy high bills, the Blackberry with “uncapped” data useage is a really good deal. BB Messenger also works a good deal better than MXit, they way its integrated into the device and has message delivery and read statuses. No more messages lost in the ether.

I’m interested in hearing about other people’s useage patterns and their thoughts on the Blackberry data bundle and value for money.