Gadgetory

do you find yourself frequently exceeding your data limit i'm taylor martin this is PocketNow and this is how to avoid data overages on your phone just when everyone got used to having an unlimited amount of bits consumed with their smartphones each month the two largest carriers in the u.s. pulled the rug out from beneath us pressures on wireless networks around the world from a massive influx of data users over the last several years has forced the rapid expansion of 4G technology those who are lucky enough to keep their grandfathered unlimited plans now get to enjoy the pleasures of LTE without limit but for some the introduction of LTE was bittersweet it came alongside dreadful tiered data plans both with hard and soft caps those with soft caps can continue to use data once they've reached their monthly allowance only at heavily throttled speeds but those on a tiered or shared data plan with a hard cap face overage fees if they hit their limit before the months end fortunately there are several ways to save your bits and avoid data overages this may sound fairly self-explanatory but the best method is to rely on Wi-Fi whenever it's available too often I catch myself leaving Wi-Fi off when I'm at the coffee shop and streaming Spotify over wireless data for hours on end when I realize I end up kicking myself over the 500 megabytes of data I could have saved myself most Android phones and the iPhone by default will notify you when you're in range of an open network so long as you have permission connect and enjoy the free internet while it lasts of all the things we may download applications and games can sometimes be the most taxing on our data allowance chewing through hundreds of megabytes and sometimes several gigabytes at a time for our sake both Google and Apple have put safeguards in place to keep us from accidentally blowing through our data allowance by downloading a large file from Google Play or the App Store on iOS you can't download an application or update larger than 50 megabytes over 3G or 4G you must connect to Wi-Fi before the download will begin on Android you're simply notified that you'll be downloading a large file and prompted to use Wi-Fi also on Android you have the option to automatically update applications which is great considering developers are constantly pushing updates to the Play Store it gets to be overwhelming updating all the applications manually all the time but Google also added the option to automatically download updates over Wi-Fi only a simple yet necessary feature for any files you may have automatically uploading such as pictures to photo stream Google+ or Dropbox make sure you select the option to only upload over Wi-Fi as well this will save a ton of precious bits especially if you're a notorious photo snapper in terms of media the cloud can be your best friend or a terrible enemy streaming media while generally quite convenient is a data hog just a few hours of streaming Spotify Pandora or even Google music can eat up several hundred megabytes of data through some of those streaming services however you can download some of your favorite tracks to play locally Spotify for example allows premium users to create and save playlists to their device for offline listening downloading these just one time especially if you do it over Wi-Fi can save you quite a bit of data the same can be said of purchase music from google music or itunes this can usually be done with videos too with YouTube on Android you have the ability to preload your subscriptions and watch later videos while on Wi-Fi movies or television episodes you purchased from Google Play can be downloaded to your Android devices for offline viewing or the same for television episodes and movies purchased from iTunes on your I devices podcasts videos and music can easily account for the majority of your data consumption so any way you can curb your streaming consumption the better or of course just rely on Wi-Fi when you can if all else fails you might want to consider upgrading your data plan to a larger one sure that means your bill will cost more than it does now but chances are if you keep exceeding your cap you can more than likely get more data for the same amount of money you pay for each overage if you're going over your cap each time anyway you might as well make the best of the extra money so that's all we've got for you this time if you like the video be sure to give it a thumbs up below and subscribe to the channel you can also find us on your favorite social networks Google+ Twitter and Facebook at PocketNow I'm Taylor Martin and I will see you next time you