Exploring Android - Part 3 - Data Use In Idle

Coming back to my roaming requirements for this part of the story, it's not only important that the web browser and the e-mail application require as little data as possible but also that Android itself is not chatting with the world and thus incurring cost. So to see what Android does, I installed "3G Watchdog" and let the mobile run overnight with Opera Mini being executed but the e-mail program shut down. Good news here as well. As I don't have any active widgets, instant messengers or other programs running that could exchange data in the background, the watchdog counter only recorded around 4 kilobytes of data exchanged. It would be interesting of just what those 4 kilobytes where but I'll leave it at that for the moment. From a roaming perspective that's quite acceptable. In other words, Android has passed my roaming data test as well.

Comments

[Franz Edler]

I sometimes ago made similiar tests but was more interested in battery drain when e.g. Skype is on to be permanently reachable.

I was also quite satisfied when I found that during night (e.g. 6 hours) the battery dropped only from 100% to 95%. Therefore I am also interested to see the traffic caused by the phone in such an "idle" state.

Next I will setup a test to get more insight into the mechanism to keep the Skype connections open.

[seogoo kang]

Yes, It does, Skype is a lot controvertial, it permanately keeps trying to connect on mutiple IPs.
It is true that it causes a battery drain and signalling congestions.