One of the drawbacks of having a smartphone is that you need a data plan from your carrier. Unless you are one of the lucky ones that have unlimited traffic, you should always check the data usage to make sure you don’t go over the limit and end up paying outrageous fees. Fortunately, 3G Watchdog can help you keep track of your data usage and notify you if you are approaching the limit.
Setting the app’s tracking timeframe is pretty easy. In fact, it is too simple. All you can choose is your quota (how much traffic you get), the period (e.g. 1 month) and the starting date. This would normally cover any scenario, but it would have been great to be able to customize it even further. My data plan has 500 MB included per month, starting on the 6th of each month. However, if I don’t use up all the bandwidth, it gets transferred to the next month. 3G Watchdog does not have any option to mimic this.
The main screen shows a progress bar with the current data consumption and a summary table with the total received and sent for today, current week and current month. Additional data is available when selecting the rows in this table. For instance, by pressing the today row you can access day traffic history that shows the traffic for each day. This data may be exported as a CSV file on the SD card.
Widgets
One great thing about this app is the widget that comes with it. It is straight-forward, comes in 2 sizes (although the large one occupies 2×2 blocks and except having a larger font doesn’t offer anything else) and displays the traffic usage in MB and percent, as well as a progress bar.
Summary
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| name | 3G Watchdog |
| publisher | Richard Gruet |
| price | free |
| advertising-supported | no |
| version | 0.24.0 |
| size | 462KB |
| developer contact | 3gdog (at) rgruet (dot) net |