Monitor Your Phone Use with Phone Dashboard

I recently replaced my iPaq hx2755 and cell phone with the Samsung i730, a Pocket PC Phone Edition device. At the time, I thought I would miss having separate devices but, as it turns out, I've never looked back. Having said that, when I bought the device I also had to purchase an unlimited data plan from my carrier, which in turn meant that I had to switch to a plan with fewer phone minutes to save money. I quickly found myself needing to constantly check how many minutes I had used to avoid going over my monthly allotment. This can be done online or over the phone but constantly calling or logging on to check became REALLY annoying after a few days.

I figured there had to be some kind of software that could help me keep track of my minute usage and I soon found Phone Dashboard, from developer Hudson Mobile. Thanks to this handy little program I no longer have to constantly call my carrier to keep an eye on my usage.

The Today Screen Plugin

The heart of this program is the today screen plugin that displays information about your usage. You can configure what information is displayed. Currently, I have set it to display the total amount of minutes I've used this month, the name and duration of the last call I made, my unbilled monthly usage (i.e., weekend and night minutes), and minutes used today. Almost every aspect of the today screen can be configured, from scroll rate, to size of the display, and more.

Configure the Program for Your Plan

The program can be configured to work with almost any phone plan. You can set the start date for your plan, the number of peak minutes you have per month, whether or not you get nights and weekends free (and what time these start and end), whether or not to round usage up, whether or not to count data calls, etc. Additionally, if you can call certain numbers for free anytime (or everyone with the same carrier as you can be called for free anytime) you can insert these peoples' numbers so that calls to them will not be taken from your monthly allotment of peak minutes. Finally, the program can be set to alert you when you've used preset amounts of your monthly minutes.

Once you've configured Phone Dashboard Minute Tracker for your plan, you can save your settings in a separate file that can be used to restore them at a later date.

Detailed Usage Information

This program doesn't just help you keep an eye on how many minutes you've used, it can also tell you a LOT about your talking habits. For starters, several graphs are available that can tell you how much time you've spent on a monthly, daily, or hourly basis. As the screenshot below demonstrates, the graphs break down the time you've spent blabbing into peak, off peak (i.e., night), and weekend minutes.

Additionally, the same information can be displayed in chart format. See:

These charts can be exported to .csv format for use in Excel and the date range to export can be selected by the user.

Phone Dashboard can also provide the user with information about every call made. This information can be sorted and filtered in various ways (e.g., by what bill they were on, by whether they were incoming or outgoing, etc.):

These call logs can also be exported.

Less useful, if you ask me, is the ability to display information about your projected usage. Some people might find this useful, but I don't. I'm very much aware that if I talk too much, it's more likely that I'll use too many minutes in a given month.

A Few Small Issues

There are only three small things that I wish were different about this program. First, if I call someone and they don't answer this doesn't count as a minute under my phone plan. However, if you've instructed Phone Dashboard to round minute usage up it will count this as a minute. To be fair, I can't think of how the program could possibly know whether or not someone answered on the other end of the line so I don't really fault the developers for this. And at least the resulting distortion yields a more conservative estimate of how many minutes you have left rather than a more liberal one.

Secondly, a lot of plans allow one to make free calls to other people in the same network regardless of what time of day it is. In order for Phone Dashboard to realize that these calls are free, however, each number must be manually entered into the program. I wish there was some way that the program would "know" what carrier the person on the other end of the phone used. Again, I don't think this is the developer's fault but I still wish it were possible to change.

Thirdly, things are a little bit "oddly placed" in this program (I can't think of a better way to describe it). For example, the graphs and charts are a major part of the program if you ask me. So it doesn't really make sense to me that they are relegated to the fifth tab of the configuration menu. By contrast, the comparatively less useful projected usage tab has its own icon on the today screen plugin. I'm sure I can't speak for everyone but I found this prioritizing to be rather puzzling.

Conclusion

Despite these small issues, Phone Dashboard is pretty darn near perfect. As I mentioned above, I stumbled across this program because I was looking for an easy way to monitor my minute usage. Phone Dashboard not only automates this process and displays the relevant information in an easy to digest manner, it provides the user with a means of monitoring every aspect of their phone use and makes it easy to export this information. If you don't have a Phone Edition device then don't even look at this program. If you do have a Phone Edition device and need to take control of it then don't look any further!