Thursday, April 10, 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.

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