The days of unlimited cell phone bandwidth are nearing the end for most mobile smartphone users. Even those unlimited plans still around often throttle your data after a certain cap, making everything noticeably slower. Besides the obvious (don’t watch a lot of videos or download a lot of apps), here are some tips to keep your data usage down.
Turn off mobile web when possible. There are lots of times that you don’t need your 3G or 4G web access. When walking between Wi-Fi hotspots, driving home, or out for a jog, you’re probably not using the internet, but your phone is still updating various apps (and using up bandwidth). Turn it off when you’re not using it, and you’ll save yourself some MB here and there.
Use Opera Mini. Opera Mini compresses websites and images so that you can load them faster and use less bandwidth. You can even go to settings and determine how much you’d like to compress images (on most screens “medium” is fine), or even not to download them altogether to really save on data usage. Opera Mini claims to compress sites by up to 90%, which can mean huge savings.
Only update apps when on Wi-Fi. You may not realize it, but your apps could be downloading many MB worth of updates and chewing up bandwidth needlessly. Go to your Google play settings and check “Update over Wi-Fi only” to make sure that your phone isn’t downloading updates that can wait.
Get a data monitoring app. While your carrier probably offers some sort of data monitoring on your phone, this may only update a few times a day, meaning that you can inadvertently go over before you realize it. I use Netcounter, which updates almost instantaneously. It also allows you to set alerts for daily, weekly, or monthly usage. Set it for a bit under your data cap so you know when to back off before the month is up.
Pre-cache your Google Maps. If you know you’ll need maps for a specific area, you can download them ahead of time on a Wi-Fi connection so that you don’t need to use up bandwidth on the go. This is also helpful when you might be roaming while traveling, or (gulp!) out of range altogether. Just hit menu, tap “Make available offline,” and select the area you need.
