iPhone Cellular Network Data Meter Dialed Down After Reboot?
Bla1ze brought this to our attention and while we’re likely not the first to notice this, we haven’t found or figured a good answer for it either. If you have a low data usage on your iPhone (in the MBs rather than GBs) and you do a reboot, when your iPhone comes back up, the Cellular Network Data meter will be lower.
Above are two screen shots taken right before and right after a reboot, which show the difference.
We’ve heard before that the usage meter isn’t accurate, can be gamed, and shouldn’t be used in place of your carrier’s official record (especially if you’re concerned about data charges), but if anyone has any insight into what’s going on (or not going on) with regards to the iPhone’s inner metering, drop us a comment and let us know.
December 29th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
Trust me, this happens ALL the time. I use over 5GB of data every month because I tether my iPhone 3G to my HP Mini 1000 and it shows me that I’m only at 444MB sent and 12.6GB received (which is grossly understated). I use my iPhone’s data EVERYDAY. There is no way that I have only used 12.6GB of data.
December 29th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
They wanna know why i have no idea although i will say i think those numbers are estimates
December 30th, 2008 at 3:45 am
My guess is that the data usuage meter ammounts are stored in some sort of cache/soft memory and the ammounts are then periodically copied into the long term/hard memory. If the phone is reset before the values are updated in the hard memory then when the phone boots again it will load the values from when they were last updated before the reset.