Mobile phone guilty pleasures

Cloud backup is the perfect solution if you hold sensitive data on your mobile, or just like to keep secure by backing your phone up regularly.

Depending on what service you use, you may find that your data consumption soars if you back everything up every single day.

For example, if you back up all of your files, photos, contacts, emails, calendars and address books using your mobile network, you could be using more than a couple of megabytes every time you automatically, or manually sync your device.

Over a month, this will certainly add up.

Video streaming

Video streaming services such as Qik and Bambuser are great applications for streaming video wherever you are and they do support streaming using your mobile network.

Even if you have an unlimited data package (as detailed above, many networks are now scrapping this), you'll find that a whole chunk of your data is used up very quickly when you stream video live.

It's a shame because although the videos are highly compressed and it's great to be able to stream while on the go but the data cost may give you a little bit of a shock!

FourSquare

Foursquare may be a great way to communicate to friends and colleagues where you are at every point of your day, but it's something that should be used wisely.

Not only is it a pain to your contacts when social networking feeds are updated every hour with what you're doing, where you are and who you're with, it can get you in trouble too.

If you're not working when you're meant to be, forget checking in at that long, boozy lunch and get down to business instead.

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.