Do you know what data is? If you do, would your parents know? Ever since mobile phones evolved from the dark ages of texts and calls we’ve seen a huge leap in what your clever little Smartphone can do for you. However most of these cool new widgets need data in some way or another. We’re sure the early adopters and tech lovers out there know exactly what they use data for on their phone, so this article isn’t for you. But for the rest of us here’s an explanation of what Data is and why you might want it.

To explain this firstly lets look at what data isn’t in terms of mobile phones. When you use your phone to call a friend, this isn’t using data, it isn’t using data either if you send your friend a text or sms message. Anything else you send or receive to your phone is using data. Unfortunately it isn’t quite this simple. Most Smartphones have applications that still allow you to talk to somebody by using data instead.  Skype is one such application that let’s you both send messages and speak to others by using data. To be sure, here are two pointers. If you’re sending a text message to a mobile number then that isn’t data and will come out of your text allowance. If you’re making a call and making it by pressing the phone icon on your screen then you’re most likely not using data. So any other form of communication that you use your phone for, probably does it with data. Another little hint is asking yourself the following:- “Can you use your computer to do this?” E-mailing a friend for example uses data and is something you most likely do on your home computer, the same goes for browsing the internet. With this is mind you should be able to infer when you are and aren’t using data on your phone.

Now we can consider how much data do you need? This is the toughest part, as it depends on what you want to do. Let’s assume that you got your new Smartphone, really, just because you like the way it looks and you’re not going to do anything else with it apart from what you used to do on your old basic Nokia 3310. Most Smartphone’s out of the box want to use data. If your phone has a screensaver showing you the next few days’ weather, it’s used data to get this information. You also find that your phone will keep checking with the internet to see if there are any improvements to the phone’s software this again uses data even if you have never asked it to do so. However, you’ll be pleased to learn that this uses hardly any data at all. If this is you, you could probably get away without a data bundle and could expect to pay around £3.00 per month in data charges, or if your plan includes at lest some data you won’t see any extra charges.

Now let’s move on 6 months and your friends have started to tell you all about what your phone can do and you decide that browsing the internet would be really useful. The problem you now face is that there are no rules to how much of your data a website can use. There are some rules that the builders of website should follow but the truth is no one website is identical to another. With that in mind the average website won’t use more that 50 kilobytes of your data. So what does that mean to you? Well, the average Smartphone plan will come with at least 100 megabytes of data. There are just over 1000 kilobytes in a Megabyte so with the average Smartphone tariff what this means to you is that you can look at around 2000 web pages a month. On average that’s 64 web pages per day that you can look at without being charged any extra with your Smartphone. An exception to this would be YouTube.com, a 10minute video on YouTube would most likely use 20 MB’s of your data. This means with your 100mb data bundle you could only watch 50 video’s per month, less then two a day. If this is what you want to do with your phone then you need to get as much data as you can with your phone’s tariff. You’re in the same situation if you want to download lots of new apps for your Smartphone or download and listen to music. The more you want your Smartphone to do the more data it uses. The good thing about data is if you connect your phone to your home wifi or a free wifi hotspot it doesn’t cost you a penny and doesn’t affect your data usage in the slightest

Hopefully if you were confused about data this little guide has made it clear for you. We’ve pointed out what data is and how much you need so here are some details on where you can pick the perfect packages. We’ve put together some deals which give you the freedom to get the most out of your Smartphone right here. All of the offers include plenty of data so you’ll be able to browse, watch and download plenty without worrying about any repercussions.