topic Re: Suggestion: Unlimited evening & weekend minutes in Norton Mobile Utilities Public Beta

Suggestion: Unlimited evening & weekend minutes

farmer4life — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:27:43 GMT

I love this app, but I really wish it could separate evening and weekend minutes when tracking usage. My plan gives me a set number of daytime minutes, but unlimited evenings and weekends. Norton Utilities, however, only tracks total minutes. So it tells me I am over my minutes usage, when in fact a lot of those are evening/weekend minutes and don't count. Thus the minutes tracking is effectively useless.

The ability to track by-the-second, rather than by-the-minute, would also be helpful.

With this feature, the app would be near-perfect (especially since I can now turn off the low battery notification)

Re: Suggestion: Unlimited evening & weekend minutes

Andmike — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 19:12:24 GMT

Hi farmer4life,

I can understand why you want to see the change but I can also see that the variety of charging options is going to cause Norton some serious problems in trying to provide everyone with what they want. However to help them better understand your needs can you more clearly define what "evenings/weekends" means in your case? Presumably the weekend is from midnight on Friday to midnight on Sunday but what is an "evening"?

Re: Suggestion: Unlimited evening & weekend minutes

farmer4life — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 20:27:25 GMT

In my case, "evening" is from 7 pm until 8 am the following morning, "weekend" is from 7 pm Friday until 8 am Monday. But these times can vary depending on the provider and plan. I understand how a default "evenings/weekends" setting would be complicated, but most plans in my area (Ontario, Canada) offer a similar set-up, so I would think it would be useful for many people.

One app I tried (don't remember which one) allowed a user to input specified times of "unlimited" usage - a scheduler of sorts, so that whenever one of these scheduled periods was active, the minutes would not be recorded. I had to input the start time and end time of each"unlimited" period, and then it would ignore all minutes used within those times. I didn't like the rest of the app so I got rid of it, but that was a really nice feature. If Norton could incorporate something like that it would be really useful.

Re: Suggestion: Unlimited evening & weekend minutes

erik_carlstrom — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 21:57:11 GMT

We've taken a look at some sort of "nights and weekends free" item, but the team has been working on other features. We also know that some carriers provide free mobile to mobile calls/sms (whether all, only on same carrier, or a limited number). Taking those into account will require working with carriers. It's something we'd like to do, but we'll see what happens.

Re: Suggestion: Unlimited evening & weekend minutes

justsomeuser — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 05:37:26 GMT

This is my number one gripe, I suppose. You allow a user to set free incoming calls, which is not common to all carriers, but do not allow evening and weekend settings, which is common to the big four in the US, and to others as well. I can see the problem of working with all the carriers to identify free calls from the same service, but the nights and weekends thing seems it ought to be a simple enough fix. Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint all have night and weekend minutes free or nearly so. Some start the evening at 7, others at 9. Weekends run from the start time of the evening before to the end of the night after. The user should be able to set this time just as he sets the number of minutes allowed. Otherwise this number and alert are meaningless digits, which pop up incessantly as I do want some more meaningful alerts - such as the data alert. WiFi data usage is a meaningless number, too, but harmless enough. Thank you.

Re: Suggestion: Unlimited evening & weekend minutes

davis — Sat, 18 Feb 2012 22:45:41 GMT

l'm for this - I've been getting phone usage warnings even though I've barely used half of my paid minutes - overage warnings are useless unless Norton can add a way to igore unlimited minute time periods. Seems allowing user to define unlimited periods would be fairly easy to implement - otherwise I like this app