Though the postpaid connection provides a stable plan, as you are no more on a leash, you may end up with a hefty bill at the end of the month. For those of you who are on an Android, I have just the right application which can bring back the prepaid leash on your postpaid connection and give you the best of both worlds. DroidStats is a nifty application for Android that makes it easy for you to keep track of your postpaid calls, SMS, and data usage. Don’t worry, you don’t need to root your device to get this feature. All you need is a droid and that’s all. You can easily monitor limited free calls and then cut down your costs using the information provided by the application.
Setting up the App to Monitor Postpaid Usage
Step 1: Download and install DroidStats on your Android from Google Play. Once the application installs, launch it to start the configuration. I will show you how you can configure DroidStats to keep track of every single phone call and SMS from your phone. Step 2: On the application, press the menu button and touch Settings. If you are on a free version, you can see four active settings here. The first one is Monthly Limit, and it’s used to configure the free monthly data calls and limit on your phone. For example, my postpaid connection provides 1400 minutes of free talktime with 2500 SMS and 1 GB data free usage every month, so I would want Droid stats to first complete all those free usage before it actually starts billing me for every call. So if you have a free usage limit on your plan click on Monthly Limits and provide the free limits for calls, SMS and data. You can also configure the starting day of your billing cycle at the end of this page. Step 3: Moving on to the Billing settings, here you can set SMS, call and data pricing. You can also provide numbers that you can call or text free of cost, and the best part is that we can use a wildcard to specify these numbers. For example, all the numbers starting from 1800 are toll-free for any landline or mobile in India, and thus I can simply enter 1800* in the app to make DroidStats skip all the numbers starting with 1800. If you have free night calling packs, you can configure them too in this section. Step 4: Moving on to the application settings, here you can control how the application should behave. The Actions settings can be used to reset the database and manually correction the data if at all DroidStats misses a particular event. That’s all, you can now monitor your postpaid data usage on your Android smartphone. Note: Some Samsung devices may have a problem with data monitoring. You can also buy the premium version of DroidStats to get on-screen widgets to warn you about your limits and to get detailed analysis of your call records.
My Verdict
Frankly, I am impressed with DroidStats. With features like free limits, toll-free numbers and time specific call monitoring there is hardly anything that it can miss. So if you are having second thoughts about opting for the postpaid connection because you think your mobile habits can drain your pockets big time, DroidStats is the first thing you should install on the phone.
