Roaming tips and tricks
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Data connections when roaming
Turning off internet connections when roaming is obviously the best way to cut costs completely, though there are cases when this is inconvenient (such as when automated email retrieval is a necessity). HOWEVER, being always online poses certain problems and risks associated mainly with your bill at the end of the month. Following is a list of the main causes for unnecessary/unwanted traffic.
Automatic updates
Problem: One of the things that happens automatically every morning around 8 o'clock is a check for updates. It usually happens silently, and you won't know about it unless there are any updates available (case in which the little orange notification pops up in the status area). Now depending on the number of active repositories, the update can use between a couple hundred kB and 5-6MB or more. This is a sure way to an eye popping bill at the end of the month (considering EU data charges of approximately 6EUR/MB).
Solution: Go into System > App manager, tap on the menu, select Application catalogs, then successively select each catalog there and check the Disabled box, then click Save.
Depending on the need to have automatic email retrieval, you might want to keep it or turn it off completely when roaming. Note for IMAP users: By default the Email application appears to check for email updates only in the Inbox folder, so to minimize data transfer you might want to set up automatic filters to divert non important emails to other folders that you can later check manually.
RSS
RSS feed readers are another type of applications which can generate traffic due to automatically updating their content. The default RSS reader has an option to update automatically only when connected to WLAN, so it's better to use that. Settings can vary for the other applications.
Weather apps
Situation quite similar to the RSS feeds apps. Automatic updates should be set to only when connected to WLAN or disabled altogether.