Hi my current phone is steam powered and I am thinking of joining the Mobile internet generation.

I am not good with such things & my provider is offering a phone with 500mb of internet.
How long does that give me on the net? Is that per day or per month?

500MB corresponds to…

Basic webpages (mainly text)

5,000

Rich webpages (with multimedia, e.g. BBC)

1,500

Basic e-mails

500,000

Rich e-mails (with attachments)

1,000

Downloading/streaming music

100 songs

Downloading/streaming video

1 hour

Skype voice call

15 hours

Skype video call

2 hours

Listening to online radio

8 hours

Downloading/updating apps

80 apps

In other words... 500mb is ok if you only plan lightish Internet use like news and sport updates etc. If you for example wanted to watch lots of videos on YouTube, download lots of music etc., or watch sky on the move, then you will find 500mb quickly restrictive.

Just a tip. Might just be my experience, but data connection on orange in Warrington seems v.poor. Me n the both had iPhones til recently, me vodafone her orange, and the difference was shocking. Orange seemed to take twice as long to load pretty much anything.

This. Both my wife and daughter are on 500mb and they cope OK with it. For the last couple of months I've been on 250mb and have not even been near this limit. I use it when I'm out to check a few websites, forums, news, facebook etc.

Remember when you are at home you'll be connected to wifi so you won't be using the data anyway. In fact, I'm with orange and they have mentioned I have a BT Openzone account as part of my Orange account so I should be able to use wifi most of the time.

I have 500Mb per month on mine. I check my email and my FB and sometimes these pages on it. My highest EVER monthly usage was 96Mb. As LB said, if you get a phone with wifi on it, you can use this in hotspots and save on your usage. I have mine connected to my router at home to save having to stick the laptop on.

Get down to Tesco and have a look at some of their deals. They offer some belter deals and the capping option is good.

Most mobile allowances, don't include regualr browsing. That is you get that for free, unlimitted.(check that yours does)

If you are just browsing sites like RLFans it won't count at all towards your limit. Streaming video or audio does though, but if you don't intend to do this then you don't need to worry as you'll get nowhere near 500Mb. As someone suggested if you know you are going to download a lot of data ie. by downloading/updating apps. Then make sure you do it over a WiFi network.

Where have you heard that?

500MB is not too bad but YouTube/Spotify/iTunes Match try and be on Wifi as it will be used up very quickly.

Tesco.....£7.50 per month 500 minutes of calls, 5000 text messages and 500Mb of data AND a free handset. Cracking deal which just doesnt include picture messages (but you can always email the picture) or usage is you are overseas on holiday.