So with my purchase of a Nexus 4, my first GOOD phone, and the badass T-Mobile $30 plan I've started streaming my music. Yeah, I'll admit the limited storage on the N4 is a factor but that's a different discussion.
Since I moved to Android I've used amazon as my music service. I noticed, while streaming music, that the Amazon mp3 app was using about 175-250 MB an hour of bandwidth. This was pretty steep, I thought, but since it's my first foray into streaming over a cellular connection I figured it was par for the course.
Yesterday I was reading the iTunes radio thread and got kind of jealous so I downloaded the Pandora mobile app to give that a try. I wanted to test it's network usage so I went for a nice hour and a half walk and tested it out. Very pleased with the content, nice mix of favorites and new artists, good audio quality. Not even much of a battery drain!
I get home and it's used less than 30mb of data according to my phones network usage screen. How is this possible? I was in the middle of nowhere. There was no mystery wifi anywhere. I was on my t-mobile connection the whole time. How did it stream almost two hours of music for like 1/7th the bandwidth of the Amazon mp3 app?
Is amazon attempting to stream like super hi-fi quality audio or some shit? I love music but I'm no audiophile so I'm not going to tell the difference between great quality audio and shitty quality.
It just seems impossible to stream that much content for so little data cost. Is the network usage screen like notoriously inaccurate or something?
Edit : So looking at the stat screen it used exactly 20.22 MB of data on my data plan yesterday during my walk. Within the past 24 hours on my wifi it's used a bit over 200 MB and I was streaming for a fair few hours, too! Pretty much my whole waking day.
If these figures are indeed accurate I'm very impressed with Pandora's efficency.