Siri Responsible For Mobile Data Explosion?

iPhone 4S users are working their way through even more mobile data than iPhone 4 owners, with voice-navigation app Siri apparently responsible for most of the extra usage.

The typical iPhone 4S user gets through twice as much data as an iPhone 4 user, and three times as much as somebody with an iPhone 3G.  These findings, from a report by network specialists, Arieso, underline the importance of Apple's new voice-based digital assistant, Siri, which is only available on the iPhone 4S.  But according to another investigation by Ars Technica, Siri didn't seem to be all that greedy, using an average of 63 KB per request.

So are iPhone 4S users really using Siri—which uploads your voice to Apple's own servers for processing—that much?  They could well be.  But is that what's causing all of that extra data usage on the iPhone 4S?

Another plausible explanation is the ever-increasing demand for data from smartphone users who are making more and more use of their mobiles?  The growing reliance on cloud computing applications is yet another reason why mobile data usage has been expanding rapidly ...

Ever since the arrival of the first iPhone and the subsequent normalisation of smartphone usage, data usage has never stopped growing.  With the roll-out of 4G, ever-more demanding mobiles and more and more cloud-based apps, mobile networks have got a challenging few years ahead!

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