Everyone’s talking about how they “burst” their data limit and started to incur insane charges on their mobile phone bills. With the removal of the old 12GB plans of yesteryear, everyone nowadays seems to be running into a data crunch. How do you save mobile data in Singapore? Well, here are some tips from VR Zone to help your bank account’s balance look a little better.
Identify Data Consuming Apps
If you realise, most of your data is being consumed by pretty much the same few apps. They are probably, YouTube, Netflix, Snapchat, Instagram and probably Chrome. As long as an app needs to load pictures or videos, chances are, it’s burning through your data like wildfire.
Check which apps are consuming your data by:
- Android: Settings>>Mobile Data
- iPhone: Settings>>Cellular
You can choose to turn off the apps ability to consume data from there as well. They would then not be able to use data in the background, meaning if you don’t activate them, they won’t have internet access. You don’t want to do this for your chat apps obviously, because it means you won’t be able to be reached by your friends or family (unless that’s what you long for).
Turn on Data Saver on Your Mobile Browsers
Most web-browsers often incur lots of data charges if you just browse freely like nobody’s business, clicking on every pretty girl’s photo you see, or browsing my reviews with lots of high-res photos. However, you can actually cut down on these data charges if you choose the data saving modes on some browsers. They could help you save up to 50% of your data consumed, although its usually more like 30% in most cases, but that’s still pretty commendable isn’t it?
Here’s how you do it on Chrome:
- Settings>>Data Saver>>On
Install Data Saving Apps
Have you heard of Opera Max or Onavo Extend? If you haven’t then you are missing out on the best data saving tip there is. Apps like Opera Max or Onavo Extend act as VPNs, Virtual Private Networks that help monitor your data usage and try to compress incoming and outgoing data to the best of their abilities. In doing so, your Instagram and Snapchat feeds are going to be compressed into a smaller size and you will hence use less mobile data when you scroll through your feeds. However, a potential downside is having to tolerate a lower-res photo or video.
Get Rid of Pictures When Browsing
Did you know that Opera Mini has a function that lets you remove all images when you browse on cellular data? If you just need some information and you don’t need quality photos, then this method of surfing the net would be pretty darn awesome. You also get the option of choosing lower quality photos if you still need some “visual aid” to accompany your browsing experience. You can set the qualities of these photos to be low and have maximum data-saving, something I found to be very useful. The only issue with this is the fact that the lack of photos may cause text and the formatting of some websites to go haywire.
