Mobile phone guilty pleasures

If you're a regular Twitter user, you'll probably find that it uses up a fair chunk of your time when on your computer. With a wealth of tweeting clients available on all platforms, it's no wonder tweeting from everywhere could cause issues.

Whether you prefer official Twitter clients, have downloaded Twitterrific, Tweetdeck or Tweetie, the likelihood of you refraining from tweeting at all in one day is very slim.

Twitter is also a great business tool, so maybe don't stop using it altogether, just try to cut back on your tweeting time. After all, only a handful of people can justify checking out the latest tweets from Justin Bieber and Stephen Fry as work-related.

Maps

Whether you use Google Maps, BlackBerry Maps or any other non-cached mapping application on your mobile, you can be sure your data is being hit hard.

Unlike cached maps such as Ovi Maps, Google Maps can consume data faster than you can say navigate. On a 300-mile trip, with Google Maps permanently downloading data, you could use up to 15MB of your allowance. That's quite a lot if your limit is 500MB and you travel a lot.

The negative point about cached mapping systems such as Ovi Maps, is that your first time download will take a while. It's best to use Wi-Fi for this, although that's not always easy when you're on the go.

Cached mapping apps can also use up a lot of your internal memory, so make sure you have sufficient space, or even better, download them onto a memory card. This way, you can swap between different maps. This is especially useful if you want to swap between countries.

Clare Hopping
Freelance writer

Clare is the founder of Blue Cactus Digital, a digital marketing company that helps ethical and sustainability-focused businesses grow their customer base.

Prior to becoming a marketer, Clare was a journalist, working at a range of mobile device-focused outlets including Know Your Mobile before moving into freelance life.

As a freelance writer, she drew on her expertise in mobility to write features and guides for ITPro, as well as regularly writing news stories on a wide range of topics.