The Webmechs Press

I just realized tonight why my internet usage billing on the iPhone seems excessive compared to, say, when I was using my Nokia XpressMusic 5800. I’ve seen a lot of complaints on the internet about such incidents and contrary to what many are suspecting it is most probably NOT the telecom carrier’s sneakiness/dishonesty, nor is it exactly the iPhone hardware’s fault.

The most likely reason you are getting billed for internet usage that you don’t believe you’re using is actually rather simple but easily overlooked, and it is: ADVERTISEMENT SERVED BY FREE APPS! Whenever an application shows an ad it loads it from the net and if you do not have wifi turned on, it will do a data connect using either 3G or GPRS (so turning off 3G will not help).  One way to make sure you don’t connect is to just stick an invalid Access Point Name (APN) in Settings -> General -> Network -> Cellular Data Network. If you have SBSettings, you can enable toggling of 3G and EDGE and toggle both off which is a more elegant of turning your data connection off as well as making it faster to turn on as well.

The iPhone is a very nice device, but one of its many flaws are that it sucks up battery juice like there’s no tomorrow (which there literally won’t be if you don’t charge it every chance you get).  For someone who has lots of music videos and who may just want to listen to the audio to conserve battery power, here’s how to do it:

1. Play the video
2. Press the power button.  The screen will go blank.
3. Double click the Home Button.  You will get the iPod controls onscreen.
4. Press play to start playing the video’s audio track only.
5. Wait for the screen to go blank automatically or…
6. Click the power button to make the screen go blank, but this time the audio will continue playing.