How much use is 250 MB plan in email text only ?

Here's a useful tool for estimating your usage:
http://www.att.com/standalone/data-calculator/

Your going to find some very emotional posts about this subject. so below is how I have done with the 250Mb plan, and is not indicative of what everyone experiences.

at 250Mb you can use about 8Mb per day and still be under in 30 days time. with the 2Gb plan you have about 66Mb/day.

If your doing less than 4 of your photos a day and sending some text only emails (don't forget, reading emails from others also downloads the pics usually), you should be able to stay under the 8MB a day easy.

I do text only browsing using the Atomic Browser, check email a few times a day and don't do any app downloads if not at home on the wi-fi, nor have notifications turned on (nothing I need to know while at work.) My 250Mb plan still had some space on it 30 days later.

I look at it this way, if you go more than 15 days on 250Mb, its more cost efficient to get the 250Mb plan over the 2Gb plan. If you go 20 Days before having to renew it, at 90 days time, you would have paid out $75US and the 2Gb user would have paid $100US. Almost enough to pay for 40 more days of data. (your ahead of the other user by a full months payment on their plan, in just 3 months).

Just my thoughts and usage, others will swear you aren't using the ipad properly or for what its meant for if you don't need the higher plan. It all depends on what you need.

Jason

Since the 3G data plans from AT&T for the iPad go month to month with no contract required, it's an easy thing to just check out yourself. Get the 250 plan for a month. If you go over, the worst that would happen is that you'd have to spend another $15 for another 250 minutes (or, I suppose worse, if you ran out in, say, one week , another $25 for 2 Gigs). My guess is that unless you're never on the Web, don't use maps or any apps that require a Web connection and don't use the App Store or iTunes, then you're gonna need more than 250 a month. Of course, if you can get (free) wifi hotspots easily, that would help.

I'd suggest starting with the 2GB plan and seeing what you actually use. It'll cost you another $10, but that isn't too terrible (it'll also let you play around to see if you would actually use it for more if you have the bandwidth available).

One of the hard things to figure is exactly how much you use -- you might only send text emails and some photos, but is the iPad constantly checking for new mail? how about other apps that try to pull data updates (ads and whatnot) when you run them? You may not intentionally be using data, but a lot can be done "behind the scenes" and 250 MB isn't a lot.