I’ve been trying out a Firefox extension that displays the minutes used in my mobile phone plan (I’ve got T-Mobile) since yesterday, and I’m really excited about it. Once you install it, you can configure it to query your plan and display the minutes used out of the total monthly minutes, right in the status bar, at the bottom of the browser window.

One note of caution: make sure you configure it to query seldom, not often (every two or three hours is plenty). It’s not polling a feed, it’s actually running a query on your provider’s database — this is because cellphone companies haven’t yet moved to the Web 2.0, so to speak, and aren’t providing feeds for the users. If you configure it to poll every 5 minutes, it’s going to be deemed excessive by them, and they might cut off your access. So be nice and gentle to their databases. 🙂

The same fellow who came up with this extension, Winston Huang, also wrote another extension to allow you to check your Verizon minutes used. There are also two extensions to allow you to check your Cingular minutes used. Here’s the first, and the second.

These extensions are wonderful productivity tools. You have your minutes used right there in front of you, the whole day. You can pretty much eliminate overage charges, and I’m all for that.