Whether you’re trying to handle your personal or professional life, you’ve probably got a mobile phone. Mobile phones are the backbone of so many different people’s lives. They are used to contact others through voice or text, access the Internet and organise all sorts of information. Both the business and personal worlds are beginning to expect you to respond instantly with the speed of your smartphone. In the very recent past, you could wait a few hours or even days to respond to an email, because people would assume you were away from a computer. Now, people expect you to be around a computer all the time, because you carry that computer around in your pocket.
Phone companies know this, and they exploit it. They know how dependent people have become on smartphones, so they do everything they can to drive prices up. It’s the basic principle of supply and demand; when it comes to mobile phones, demand is incredibly high. So is there anything you can do to keep your own personal expenses low?
Unlock Your Phone
Unlocked mobile phones help keep your expenses low while affording you an extended amount of freedom. These phones are considered ‘unlocked’ because they are not bound to any service provider. That’s one of the chief ways companies control how much you spend by driving their prices up; they create software that prevents their phones from being used on any operating system or network other than the one they want you to use. When your phone is unlocked, though, you can use any network you want.
When you’re at home, that helps save you money because you can choose a service provider offering the best rates and best service. When you’re able to pick, you can place them in competition. Furthermore, an unlocked phone can also save you money when you’re travelling elsewhere. If your phone is only compatible with one service provider, what do you do when you travel and that provider is no longer available? In short, you would have to buy a whole new phone and opt for some kind of short-term contract. Obviously, that’s going to be pretty expensive.
Alternatively, an unlocked phone can accept an SIM card from many different providers, which allows you to buy a short-term contract anywhere in the world.
Reduce Your Data Usage
Keeping your data under control is another great way to reduce your expenses. You can do this in a few different ways. Many Internet browsers actually have some kind of ‘data saver’ feature. That feature tends to demand the smallest version of every possible website. You can even block images in certain browsers, which will greatly reduce your data usage. Furthermore, you can turn off any kind of automatic updates. If your phone wants to update something, it will send a request to you instead. On certain phones, you can even set it so that it only updates automatically when you’re within range of a valid Wi-Fi connection.
Reducing your data usage and unlocking your phone are the two most efficient ways to reduce your phone expenses.