How much data does your smartphone use? With the rise of capped monthly limits, this becomes an interesting question, even before you consider how much data you should put aside for when you are travelling abroad. Nielsen have surveyed a number of mobile phone bills in America to get the answer, and it's less than 600 MB a month (reports GigaOM).

Naturally there's a variation depending on the Operating System, but Symbian is relegated out of the results with it being an American company surveying American users. The headline has a value of 582 MB belonging to Android, down to 127 MB for RIM users. Windows Phone sits somewhere in the middle on 327 MB.

There's a danger in reading too much into these numbers, and trying to answer why a certain platform is using more or less data than another. It's likely that the survey just isn't detailed enough to get a decent level of accuracy, and the market segmentation between a 50 year old CEO and his Blackberry, and a 16 year old iOS user is going to add another distortion, but overall it gives us a number to work on.

I wonder if the networks who set the data caps will pay attention?