My phone’s been surprisingly resilient. It’s suffered such remarkable damage at my hands and, it has its quirks, but still basically works. It’s impressed me.
I have a Motorola Krzr K1, and it’s not particularly smart. I can’t be certain how long I’ve had it, but if sure feels like it’s been a long time. (Honestly, I could probably check.)
I’ve always secretly planned to get a new phone one day. Probably featuring Android. It may not have been much of a secret. In fact, I imagine it’s probably a fairly normal dream.
But a dream was all it was, I was comfortable waiting for a good month-to-month plan and, ideally, for Android 3.
And then a terrible things happened. My phone stopped working for over sixteen hours. Android 3 was months away, and talk and data plans were worse than ridiculous, while contract-free data plans were difficult to find. It’s fair to say that I panicked, and when I panic even fairer to say I sometimes take things too far.
With such terrible options, it seemed more important than ever to customize a plan to my usage so as not to get owned in the wallet every passing month. The various plans seemed to offer the inclusion of one in three features: a small number of free numbers, a low constant multiple applied to your anytime local minutes, or extended evenings and weekends. I wasn’t sure which would most benefit my usage tendencies, and I wasn’t at all convinced that my actual matched my imagined use.
Truly, I can be pretty skeptical. It is a failing of mine.
But at this point I wanted to win pretty hard anyway, so why not find out?
I had some very specific questions I wanted to ask, but only three months of data to search for answers in. Average data is a bit skewed since October is only partially over, but we can correct for that fairly easily.
How many minutes do I average per month?
In total, how many minutes to I tend to use in a month? 195
How many billable minutes do I average per month?
How many minutes do I use, not including weekends and evenings. 117
Obviously I use more billable minutes than I do free, but perhaps the more important lesson learned from this graph is that I would benefit from having at least 150 anytime local minutes. Or, to be safe, 200. This is a departure from my current 100 minute plan, which I thought would suit me since I am more of a texter. Apparently I was very wrong.
Who do I talk to most during billable time?
Fiona
Who do I just talk to most?
Fiona again, but it’s close
I learned some interesting things from these two graphs. One being that apparently Fiona and I talk frequently. Another, and perhaps more important, being that JT has a job. He works during the week, so I mostly talk to him during evenings and on weekends. He often works Saturdays though, and occasionally takes Monday’s off, which explains his noticeable presence in the billable chart.
But most importantly, we can see that I talk to just two people most, after which it drops off pretty drastically. If those two numbers were free, it would cut down a great deal on my billable minutes.
Which hours do I use the most?
12pm, 6pm, 7pm
Not including weekends. Blue bars are billable hours, and green are evening hours. Averaged by month.
This graph seems pretty straight forward. I’m not sure why I talk on the phone so much around noon – possibly clients, but more likely people who want to go for lunch. The swell toward the evening is probably to do with coordinating the night’s plans. I could probably benefit from an increased evening window, especially if it started at 6pm, but I’m not sure that it would be more beneficial than the other two options.
So hopefully by generating these graphs and answering those questions I’ve provided myself with some useful information that I can use to customize a plan to best suit my use! Either way, I will wait for more data and ideally some sort of promotion to counteract the terrible, terrible plans currently available.