Should I disable data to conserve data usage and battery?

[Tara100]

Hi

My lovely daughter bought me a Moto G for Christmas, and its my first android phone.
She's paying for the contract, which gives me 1000mb per month. I know that's not a huge amount, but it's more than enough for my requirements when using the phone away from home.

On a day out together recently, I turned on 'data enabled' and began to search via google for some info. After I had finished, I immediately went back and unchecked the box. My daughter asked why I did this, and I said 'to save my data allowance being eaten up' Well she is adamant that usage isn't affected this way, and that what I'm doing isn't necessary, as my allowance only ticks down when I am actually using the net and / or apps.

Can you advise please? :-[

Many thanks
Tara

 

[someguy01234]

re: Should I disable data to conserve data and battery?

It's a good idea to do that to not use up data and save battery. It depend on what services you use and apps you have installed. Let's say if you have Gmail, Facebook or Twitter apps installed and set it to always check for updates automatically, undoubtly your data will be used. The same with widgets if you use a weather widget that update periodically. There are many Google services that work on in the background as well if you enabled them, such as Google Now.

You can monitor data usage and create bandwidth cap in "Settings -> Data usage". If you tap on the "3dots menu button", you can disable "autosyncing" and enable "restrict background data".

I use "SynkerForce Widget", I disable autosyncing and manually tap on the Synker widget to force syncing whenever I need to (actually I create an automatic task to manually sync every 1 hour, but that's a different topic). Before you disable autosyncing, you can go in "Settings -> Google (under Accounts) " and in your account you can uncheck which Google services you don't want to sync, so Synker will only sync the selected services.

 

[B. Diddy]

re: Should I disable data to conserve data and battery?

On a day out together recently, I turned on 'data enabled' and began to search via google for some info. After I had finished, I immediately went back and unchecked the box. My daughter asked why I did this, and I said 'to save my data allowance being eaten up' Well she is adamant that usage isn't affected this way, and that what I'm doing isn't necessary, as my allowance only ticks down when I am actually using the net and / or apps.

Welcome to Android Central! You're actually correct on this. Using any app that accesses the web while mobile data is enabled will use up some of your data plan--that includes the Google Search app. I also turn off mobile data when I don't need it, even though I have unlimited data on T-Mobile, because it does save a little battery to keep mobile data off.

You are also correct in that 1 GB of data per month is probably going to be totally fine for you--I was barely using 600-700 MB of data per month when I was on a shared data plan with Verizon, because I tended to use wifi when I could.

 

[Tara100]

re: Should I disable data to conserve data and battery?

Thanks both of you (sorry, I thought I had replied days ago!)