If you have an iPhone and a contract with your carrier (of course you guys in the US do), then I guess you’re obsessed with data usage tracking: how many messages can you send per month? What’s the threshold for mobile internet access? How much have you consumed this week? Depending on the country and carrier, the experience can be terrible. Fortunately, I have a pretty good plan with 3 Italia over here (4 GB internet / month, 400 SMS, 800 minutes voice) so I haven’t really worried about keeping track of my usage - I understand, though, that this is a problem for many.
DataMan by XVision is probably the most complete app to monitor and even geotag your daily, monthly and week data usage on your iPhone.
Unlike Bjango’s Consume (which is, without a doubt, prettier and easier to setup) you can’t plug into your carrier’s settings: you have to enter monthly thresholds manually, and we’re talking about data-only here. There’s no way to track SMS and voice, but DataMan can also record Wifi activity, beside cellular data.
The app is organized in three tabs at the bottom: Current, History and Settings. The Settings page is where you’ll want to set your bill date (thank god), data allowance per day, week and month, alerts. While the Current tab serves as a dashboard to quickly take a look at your data usage, the History page immediately intrigued me: once you’ve selected a period of time, you can check on your past usage by location. You’ll get a Google Map with “data points”, so you can see where you connected, and how much traffic was consumed. If 300 MB are assigned to your girlfriend’s place, then I think you have a problem.
DataMan is a simple app that helps you in tracking your monthly cellular data, and its location feature is what got me interested. If you care about having detailed results about your internet usage on the iPhone, at $0.99 in the App Store you might want to give this a try.
