Since the N900 now has a cellular modem and it's an internet tablet, users are very likely to use a lot of bandwidth. It would be nice to have a small widget that displays your current amounts of transmitted and received data that can be placed anywhere on your Maemo 5 desktop. Some of us can't get those fancy unlimited data plans.

Because I'm such a great ASCII artist, here's how I imagine it.

While yes, you can just look at a dialog box buried within the Control Panel to see the info needed, it's just much simpler this way.

Potential programmers/widget makers, you can retrieve the data for the phone's data connection through /proc/net/dev. The connection name whose data we are interested in is named phonet0 within /proc/net/dev and is accessible without root.

What do you guys think? Does it need anything? Is there something I forgot about? Anyone interested in helping make this a reality? It would probably take you only an afternoon.

Brainstorm Link: http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...users_to_find/

I think its a great idea. Please implement!

Also, I want the homeIP widget in Maemo 5.

if this was a brainstorm idea, and the problem was "hard to keep track of data transfer in cases where it costs by the byte", i would add another 'solution': create a possibility to get notifications when x, y, & z amount of bytes have been transferred.

that would have saved me nearly 500e this summer when roaming.

Can we get a reset button (like an odometer trip A and B button?) so we can start counting at the beginning of our next billing cycle?

Great idea! I would also like to see it display the date of the last reset. Maybe even an option to automatically keep track of the consumption from the start of each day or month, since many data plans have daily or monthly limits.

Yes, a widget is a great idea, but even better if it's combined with a more full-featured app, with notifications, graphs of usage over time, and so on.

That's a function I would be too worried I'd hit accidentally if it's just on the desktop... but it could be in the widget configuration as an option. Also, resetting the number is supported from the control panel.

I can agree with you, but let's start with something smaller first and see how it goes from there. I'd much rather have this ready ASAP for release than have to wait for a full app to be written first.

For OS2008 there is TrafficCounter applet. I find it quite nice.
It has reset buttons for both total and current session counters and at the moment checks the wifi and the bluetooth.

Maybe someone could help the developer find where to check for this info too?

Zerojay, please add this to the Brainstorm!

Tim

I wasn't sure if I should because it seems Brainstorm is more for overarching problems and solutions to them whereas this sort of thing is so small that any competent programmer - which I am not - can knock out in a night, easily.

But if you insist... adding it now.

See the first post in the thread for the link to Brainstorm.