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Location: Born in L.A. - NYC is Second Home - Rustbelt is Home Base
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I have had a non-smartphone Tracfone for years. It costs me $75 to $100 per year. I never could afford the monthly bill and contract for a smartphone, but wanted to see how much a basic prepaid smartphone bill would be for the year.
Walmart has some Tracfone smartphone 1GB cards for $10. Do you think that I could get by on 1 GB per month? I'd be using it for email, weather, online forums, news, web surfing / research. No videos or TV use.
We have a tracfone smartphone. We just use it for calls and texts. Only use of GB is texts with pictures attached (sending or receiving). I think we use 3 GB a year. It makes more sense to use your computer for the rest as you are paying for it anyone and it's unlimited.
Online forums, web surfing research and how often you need to see the weather will be an unknown, most smartphones have a weather app right on your home screen and that hardly uses anything, forums and web surfing usually have ads on them and those use data, some forums you can use an adblock app on your phone on and that would keep data down, so to answer your question, 1 GB of data a month is usually plenty for most people who do not use the phone for facebook, business, a gps and do not turn on location, or at least do not keep it on.
I am on AT&T and am allowed 3 GB a month and do not use even 1, but I also use wifi at friends homes and while home, I believe how much you are out and about will be the key. Most decent phones have a data gauge, set it and it will give you an idea of how much you are using.
I have had a non-smartphone Tracfone for years. It costs me $75 to $100 per year. I never could afford the monthly bill and contract for a smartphone, but wanted to see how much a basic prepaid smartphone bill would be for the year.
Walmart has some Tracfone smartphone 1GB cards for $10. Do you think that I could get by on 1 GB per month? I'd be using it for email, weather, online forums, news, web surfing / research. No videos or TV use.
Thanks
I keep the cellular data turned off when I'm at home (most of the time, since I'm retired) and just use the phone on wifi. I sometimes turn the data on when I go out, for navigation, games, web surfing, news, etc. I don't think that I even use 1GB per year, let alone per month.
My wife uses an Apple iPhone 6S on a Tracfone account. I bought the phone directly from Apple and I got the Tracfone micro-sim card from Wal-Mart for about $10.
She uses very little data because the phone is generally connected via wi-fi.
Tracfone has an app on ios that shows real time updates on your data account. That phone costs us only about $100 per year and here, Tracfone uses the Verizon network.
I've been using Tracfone since 2007. It's perfect for my light cell phone use. I use my phone on wifi as much as possible but it is nice to be able to make an occasional brief phone call or text. I use very little data, only to check email, maps or weather occasionally.
I have an app that I can use to monitor data usage and often use less than 100mb per month. Sometimes I use a little more. When I did a week long road trip I used about 300mb. So 1gb can last me about a year.
I have about 3000 units in each bucket, and years of service days stacked up so I don't need to add anything for a few more years.
If you do feel the inclination to do anything other than what you've suggested just download, cache, offline it first on Wi-Fi. Should be okay.
Also don't forget to turn off updates over mobile, and I would still use a web browser with a data saving feature, like Opera, or UC Browser. Firefox but they turn off images completely, which can be annoying.
Twitter Lite if you ever feel the need to do social media.
Back in the day you could set up Google Newsstand to automatically save articles from magazines you subscribe to, to the phone on Wi-Fi, which would then save you data once you read them on your phone.
The new Google News has those same options, plus a data saver. Make sure that the Data Saver mode is kept on Automatic.
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