Archive for March, 2010

I’ve always been gutted that I can’t see how much voice minutes or data I’ve been consuming every month on my BlackBerry. For the voice part, I’ve been relying on my operator: it offered this service for free from the beginning and while, for a few years, the service wasn’t very exact ( a large number of subscribers used it almost daily in order to verify the authenticity of the initial reading) . But for more than 4-5 years now it’s quite OK and the readings are almost real-time. So it’s a good thing: I don’t have to install an application for that and I don’t have to keep it runnin’ in the background in order to know how much data I “eat”.

I can understand RIM’s reticence when it comes to implement a data counter: it’s not easy to see your customers are cutting-down on surfing the web when they see they consume tens of MBs daily because they stream music & video (an area at which BB sucks anyway). There is always the “unlimited data plan” with an asterisk – they might shut-down your data pipe as soon as you hit 200 MB.

I thought I found a way last year: the perfect data counter! I loved it.  I used it with the Bold 9000 and if you read the review I hope you’ll use it too – it’s a very nice, simple and UI-clean application. I don’t use it anymore and not because it wasn’t good, but because I have a truly unlimited data-plan and because I wanna keep my RAM as free as possible.

Today I was surfing Crackberry as I sometimes do and I read this and thought: this guy has to have an IT policy on his girlfriend’s phone and that’s the reason he can’t run that app. Which was correct. A thing he also found out after countless call on his operator and reading pages throughly over the net. But he also found out that by going to Options/Status and typing ” BUYR ” (except for the “”, of course) you can find out if your smartphone and an IT policy in place or not. Mine doesn’t have one. And what else?

Data and call counters! Yes. Primitive, one-line counters but they’re there. And they’re kinda general. Why? Probably for the reason above: RIM doesn’t care although the feature’s been requested by a lot of people for YEARS! And if you know something about programing, you know that it might take a programmer a few days to come-up with a nifty solution. Or maybe a “dumbphone” solution: in – calls, out – calls, total counter, reset options and maybe, just maybe a date-set automatic reset.

Back to the counters: if you know about this trick and you have a new phone you can always write down the data when your subscription resets in order to find out roughly how much time you spent on the phone talking every month. With the data counter is a bit tricky, as it only tells you exactly how much data you ate until it reaches 1 GB, then good luck and good riddance.You can hit 1 GB in less than 2 weeks if you stream and watch YouTube…which luckily I don’t because Blackberry sucks at compressing videos.

But having those “one-liners” tells us the system needs those internal “applications” in order to function properly and so would we.

PS: Looks like a lot of people knew that particular code above; why wasn’t I aware of that? Well, maybe it’s because they only wrote about in forums and those aren’t claiming too high in ranks on Google.