Your app & game guide to the Soccer World Cup in Brazil!

With the Soccer World Cup a mere 2 months away, it’s time to get prepared! We’ve got boots, apps and games to get you in the mood for Brazil!

First, let’s kick things off with Nike’s latest revolutionary addition to the world of football! If a sock and a pair of soccer boots were to have kids, the new Nike Magista would be it. It’s as durable as a soccer boot but as comfortable as a pair of knitted socks your gran would’ve made you.

With a boot this advanced there is no doubt in my mind that I’ll finally be able to bend it like Beckham! 

If you’re one of the fortunate couple of hundred thousand heading to the soccer world cup, then best you take your A-game with you in terms of apps!

• The first would be a free English to Brazilian translator app that’ll get you to the right train on time. It’ll tell people your name as well as help you get directions to your hotel. Just make sure you download all the in-app purchases BEFORE you leave South Africa other those horrendous roaming charges will kick in!
• Another useful app is the Travel Guide to Brazil which shows you the best places to visit as well as what to do and what not to do. For example, it warns you about the possible dangers of eating food from vendors! Ugh! Did you know that Brazil has 5 regions, 135 cities, 25 national parks AND 4 islands!? Neither did I until I found this app. Another great feature, it too helps with the language barrier by giving you basic phrases essential when travelling abroad!
• Finally, where would we be without a good game schedule! World Cup Soccer App has ALL the information you need. What match is playing where & when, a picture of the stadium as well as indicating what the score or scores will be!

If, like me, you won’t be able to get to the games, you can still get into the spirit by downloading Fifa 14 on the new Nokia Lumia! 

It’s a great way to get as frustrated here as you might do at the actual games themselves! The gameplay is as user friendly as a mobile game can get with easy to use controls and great graphics!

I hope there's enough here to keep you busy during the greatest game on earth starting 12th June, 2014! 

How to Reduce Data Usage!

(one of these days we'll have a screen grab with my eyes open...)

It’s funny how a couple of years ago you could quite easily get by with a 250MB per month data bundle from your mobile service provider. These days however you’ll be lucky to get away with 1 gig! Let’s not forget that if you go OVER your limit, you’ll be charged in the region of R2/mb! So, we scoured the net for a few tips and tricks on how to keep your data usage down to a minimum…

The first thing to do is to monitor your data usage and we’ve discovered a great little app called ‘My Data Manager’ which will do it for you. You can set your own limit per month and it will alert you when you’re reaching that threshold. You can also see what you’re spending most of your data on.

Browsing websites can drain a bunch of data especially when surfing websites not designed for mobile devices. To curb this extra expenditure, use an app like 'Opera Mini' which is designed to compress data and keep it down to a minimum. Even Google Chrome has this feature which you can manipulate in the settings menu of the app itself.

'Onavo Extend' is another such app but it compresses all data across your apps and will show you exactly how much data you’ve saved per month! It doesn’t work for streaming video content or Voice Over IP apps but trust me, it’ll still help. And here’s the kicker… the app only kicks in when you’re in a wifi zone – so it doesn’t chew up data…

Another element you should consider when purchasing free game apps is that these generally come with adverts that’ll randomly pop up when you’re playing. These use data. So either spend just a little more for the ad free version or, simply put the phone into flight mode.

Look, at the end of the day you just need to be internet savvy and know that streaming from Youtube is expensive as you’re looking at around 12megs / min for a 1080p video and browsing Facebook is gonna cost you around 1meg / page including opening your friends photos they’ve just posted! So just be cautious and use your common sense.