Don’t be fooled by Consume’s icon: this usage monitor has nothing to do with pie. There isn’t even a pie chart anywhere in the app, and trust me, I’ve looked. No, Consume is actually a phone and internet plan counter, and it shows you all of the relevant account information on cards (similar to the default Stock and Weather applications).
So instead of worrying about whether you’ve been texting too much or used up too much data while tethering, you can simply load up the app up and check. Depending on how much of your plan you’ve used up, Consume could easily become the bearer of bad news, but even bad news looks good within the confines of this UI.
Setup
Setting Consume up is very easy, although you’ll have to know the login and passwords for your carrier and internet accounts. I’d also suggest you take a look at the bjango website before buying the app, so you can make sure that you’re in one of the seven currently supported countries. The app tracks the consumption of your plan by way of “recipes”. These files are all kept server side, and the advantage to that is that bjango can update recipes to reflect a change in a carrier’s plan, or even add support for new carriers and plans, all without ever having to update through the App Store.
I subscribe to Rogers Wireless (aka “Robbers”) for my iPhone and cable internet services, and so it was just a matter of entering the same logins that I’d use on their website, and specifying the limit on my iPhone’s data plan. Once that was done there were two cards inside of Consume: one for my iPhone, and one for my cable internet bill.
Cards
Both cards look very neat and tidy, and the information can be refreshed over wifi, 3G, or EDGE. However, I have had some problems with refreshing my Rogers plans on anything but wifi, and bjango’s FAQ acknowledges this is a known problem. [Fixed in a later update! Works very nicely on 3G/EDGE for me on Rogers]
The internet card shows my usage information for the month, a countdown timer until the plan refreshes, and a set of average statistics for the month. My iPhone card is a lot less detailed (weekday minutes, SMS, and data usage), but that’s because the Rogers site doesn’t really provide much usage information to begin with. If you’d like to share more of your usage info, you can choose to tweet the info on an individual card, or send usage stats to bjango if you think there’s something wrong (or if you just want everybody to know how much data you hog).
Conclusion
So that’s all that Consume is: a simple, non-pie related, phone and data consumption counter that seems to just work. Account creation is simple, and if Bjango’s Rogers recipe can be fixed, I’ll be able to delete the Rogers My Account app and trust Consume to keep me up to date on my monthly plans.
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Consume is available on the App Store for $1.99.
Consume was provided by bjango for review on Just Another iPhone Blog. For further information regarding our site’s review policies, please see the “About” page.
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