Ever since I started using WiFi over my N95 using the ad-hoc connection over my laptop, I knew I wanted some kind of monitoring to my data usage. I wanted to know the speed of the download as well as the data consumption I was making with my device. I was looking for a very simple solution that would be easily accessible and I couldn’t find any, until I stumbled on mConnection.
Available now for S60 3rd Edition, mConnection from Mobile-Inform is a small utility that does exactly what you need it to do. It tells you, for your active access point, how much data you’ve downloaded, how much you’ve uploaded and also the speed of the download. I really like two things about it. First is that no matter what time you launch it, it picks up the whole data transfers since the moment you last started using that access point. Second, it displays a small white box on the upper right of your screen, on top of any application you’re in, so that you can live monitor the connection. How cool is that? Here are two screenshots. The first shows the mConnection menu which displays your active connection with the following criteria in order: received / sent / transfer speed. The second shows emTube running with the white box on top showing the received data as well as the speed.
mConnection can be extremely useful for those of you who aren’t on unlimited data plans, since it should help you monitor your usage. It can also be useful to determine which websites or which applications are data hungry, as well as keep an eye on your transfer speeds.
Now I have good and bad news for you. Good news first? Well mConnection is a freeware and you can download it here. It’s still in beta and the developer is working on a couple of features to implement later. Bad news? You guessed it, it’s not signed, so you can only use this if you have a certificate. Good thing is that you can always contact the developer on his forum and ask for him to sign the software, or wait for the new version that he says will be open signable.
