7 ways to reduce data consumption on your Android smartphone
Cellular data used to be something we took for granted, until carriers switched to tiered plans. Even the so-called unlimited options throttle you after using a certain amount of gigabytes, making data a resource we hold very dear. Are you trying to make the best out of your precious megabytes? Let us show you some of the best tips for conserving data consumption and making your limited internet last longer, all without murdering your experience!
1. Turn on data compression on Chrome!
Most of you are probably Android supporters. And hence, you are also likely Chrome users. Did you know Google’s popular browser has a feature that can reduce data consumption significantly? Google states this option should save you about 50% in data. All without you even feeling a difference. In fact, you may feel some changes – browsing will get faster!
What Chrome’s data compression option does is route all your web browsing through Google’s servers. The Search Giant then takes the website’s data, compresses it, optimizes it for the smaller screen and sends it back to your device.
All you have to do is open Chrome, tap on the 3-dot menu button and select Settings. Click on Data Saver and then toggle the option in the top-right corner. You are done!
2. Download Opera Max
Google’s data compression feature is awesome and all, but it only works within Chrome. What about all the other apps? They sure are spending a lot of precious internet juice. Those who want system-wide compression can have it with Opera Max, a data management app which comes from a major Chrome competitor – Opera (duh).
This application is pretty awesome, as it essentially does the same as Chrome’s data compression, but for every single app in your smartphone. As a result, the user can save about 50% data on everything they do with their devices.
It is also possible to micro manage consumption by blocking specific apps from accessing data through mobile access (or WiFi, though I don’t see the point in that). The Opera Max home page will then show you a detailed description of how much data you have been saving. Those megabytes sure add up quickly!
Download Opera Max from the Google Play Store!
3. Restrict background data
Some apps just spend too much data, even when the smartphone is not in use. It’s actually one of the greatest features on Android, as background data allows you to keep everything updated and monitored while you are off doing other things. The deal here is that not every app needs to stay active at all times.
Go into Settings > Data Usage and select the app you want to restrict data for. In the stats you will see two types of data: foreground and background. If you find background data is too high and you don’t need the app to stay active, simple toggle the switch that is labeled as “Restrict app background data”.
4. Update apps only via WiFi
This one is a bit of an obvious one for many of us, but plenty of users out there continue updating their applications over cellular connections. This is OK if you choose to do it, but how many times have you noticed all your apps were auto-updated without your consent, spending all them precious GBs? Hopefully not too often, but if this is an issue, we can show you how to stop it from happening again.
Just open the Google Play Store and tap on the hamburger menu button (three horizontal lines parallel to each other). Hit the Settings option and then select the “Auto-update apps” button. Hit “Auto-update apps over WiFi only”.
5. Keep an eye on your account syncing settings
We love our active syncing and push notifications, but having these also means the phone has to keep checking servers for any new content. You must also realize many apps and services are set to keep sync by default, and often we don’t even use them!
This is why you should keep an eye on your account syncing options. Just go to Settings > Accounts. For the sake of showcasing useless services, let’s just jump into your Google accounts and select your most used one. In my case, all toggles are turned on, so I am syncing app data, Calendar, Chrome, Contacts, Docs, Drive, Gmail, Google Fit, Opinion Rewards, Photos, Play Music, Google+, Keep, Slides and many others. Now, I know for a fact I don’t use about 20% of these, so I can turn them off and save myself some precious data! Do the same for other accounts, as well.
6. Avoid streaming content
As much as we hate it, it is the awesome stuff that uses up the most data. This includes streaming videos and music, as well as looking through high quality images or GIF files. Try to avoid these at all costs if you really want to take care of your internet usage.
Now, we know a smartphone is worthless without your media, but there are ways to stay entertained responsibly. Users can opt for storing music and videos locally. If you absolutely must stream, make sure you jump into the settings and set quality at lower rates. Likewise, you can decrease resolution in YouTube and other video streaming apps.
7. Cache everything you can!
Certain apps allow for storing data locally. These include popular ones like Google Maps and Google Play Music. Make sure you cache as much content as you can while you are on a WiFi network. Then you can go out and enjoy your content without spending any of your precious data.
Wrapping up
So there you have it, guys! These are just some of my favorite tips for reducing data consumption without sacrificing your experience too much. I could give you many other tips, but they would deem your smartphone useless. I wanted to find a good balance. By using these techniques, you can enjoy your phone while also spending data responsibly.
Do you have any other tips you want to share? Are you planning to adopt any of these? Have you been applying them already? Hit the comments and let us know!
Google Photos will now automatically surface pictures you took in years past
The revamped Google Photos service that was introduced at I/O this year is already one of our favorite ways to manage our ever-growing image collections, and Google keeps on adding features to make it better. The latest is a new tool that lets you walk down memory lane, so to speak. The Google Photos “assistant” will now show you cards that contain images that you shot on the same day in years past, letting you reminisce about whatever exciting things you took pictures of way back when. It’s not clear yet if this new feature will show you every single photo you snapped on a given day or just a curated selection, but either way it sounds like a smart way to surface images that you may have forgotten you ever took.
Google has wisely chosen to make this an opt-in feature, so if you’re worried about being reminded of past exes or other memories you’d like to avoid, just keep the feature turned off. It otherwise seems like a smart addition to the ever-growing Google Photos feature set — the Timehop app is just one example of a service that’s found a place for itself by surfacing old memories and photos you’ve posted to social media, and Facebook has its own “on this day” feature to tickle the old nostalgia bone. Google says its new memory-surfacing features will roll out today on iOS, Android and on the web.
Source:
Google Photos (Google+)
Tags: google, GooglePhotos, nostalgia, photos, update
Google is lowering the amount of pre-installed apps on your Android device
Android users have been complaining for the longest time about lots of unwanted bloatware coming pre-installed on their devices. According to a new report, Google is willing to change that.
As most of you know, when you first boot up an Android smartphone or tablet, there is a group of apps that come pre-loaded. Although Google’s applications are very useful to some, many complain that there should at least be an option to uninstall them. Many manufacturers have attempted to remove some of their own bloatware apps, and carriers have done the same. Most of the pre-installed apps on your Android device belong to Google, but a new report suggests the company is willing to help that. Google has decided to remove some of the mandatory apps. These will include:
- Google Newsstand
- Google Play books
- Google+
- Google Play games
The above list of apps will no longer come pre-loaded on your Android device, but will always be available to download in the Play Store. No word has been mentioned on when this will go into action, but you can expect it to start shortly. Even though many manufacturers and carriers are beginning to solve this issue, we are far from a bloatware free device. Hopefully this will include more open storage space straight out of the box.
Via: Android Central
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Giphy Cam wants to be the Instagram of GIFs
Everybody loves a good animated GIF but they’re just such a pain to create from a mobile device. Or rather, they were a pain to create on mobile devices now that Giphy’s new mobile camera app is available. The Giphy Cam is a free iOS app that allows users to create and share animated gifs as easily they do overproduced shots of their lunches.
Giphy Cam with a 5-shot burst and 3D filter
The app, which is reportedly in the works for the Android platform, captures either a 10 second full-motion clip or a 5-shot burst of stitched-together still images. Users can then add one of 10 Instagram-esque filters as well as any of 40 overlaid special effects and props before sharing their creation across the social media spectrum. Users can also just save their new gif-based masterpiece to the camera roll for local storage.
Giphy Cam on loop with X-Ray Specs overlay
Filed under:
Cellphones, Wireless, Internet, HD, Mobile, Apple, Google
Tags: android, animatedgifs, apple, camera, cameraroll, effects, filters, gifs, giphy, giphycam, google, ios, mobilepostcross, photography, sfx
Bing beats Google Now to system-wide contextual search
If you can’t wait for Android Marshmallow, Microsoft is offering an alternative for one of its most highly anticipated features. With the Bing Search app installed, you can now get “snapshots” by long-pressing on the home button, just as you would to launch Google Now on Tap. Microsoft’s search engine will then scan what’s on the page and bring up a small overlay card with useful information and shortcuts to related apps. So if you’re watching the trailer for Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, for instance, you’ll get its current IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes ratings, as well as an option to order tickets with Fandango. At the moment the feature is only supported in the US, and you’ll need to download the app to get started — unlike Google’s offering — which will almost certainly curb its popularity. Still, if you’re curious to see what Google Now on Tap is all about, this is a good preview.
Filed under:
Cellphones, Microsoft, Google
Via:
The Next Web
Source:
Bing Search
Tags: android, bignsnapshots, bing, bingsearch, google, googlenow, googlenowontap, microsoft, snapshots
Google gives the world a peek at its secret servers
Google has given everyone a rare look inside its server rooms and detailed how keeps up with the massive growth of its search business. In a blog post, Google Fellow Amin Vadat said that the company’s current network, Jupiter, can deliver a petabit per second of total throughput. That means each of its 100,000 total servers can randomly speak to each other at a speed of 10Gb/s, a hundred times faster than the first-generation network it created in 2005. To get there, Google did something surprising — it built its own hardware from off-the-shelf parts.
It was back in 2004 that Google decided to stray away from products by established companies like Cisco and build its own hardware using off-the-shelf chips from companies like Qualcomm. The aim was to put less onus on the hardware and more on software, something that’s impossible with off-the-shelf switches. Vadat said hardware switching is “manual and error prone… and could not scale to meet our needs.” Using software switching was not only cheaper but easier to implement remotely — critical for a company whose bandwidth requirements have doubled (or more) every year.
Google considers its servers as a key advantage over rivals like Microsoft and Amazon, so why is it talking now? For one, it’s recently started selling its cloud services to other businesses, so it’s keen to brag about them. It’s also being pragmatic — its data requirements are now so huge that it needs academic help to solve configuration and management challenges. That’s why it’s presenting the paper at the Sigcomm networking conference in London, and if you’re in the mood for a (much) deeper dive, you can read it here.
Filed under:
Peripherals, Internet, Google
Via:
WSJ
Source:
Google
Tags: DataCenters, google, GoogleCloud, Growth, Servers, Switches
The worldwide smartphone market is slowing down
There’s a statistic floating around that says that nearly everyone on Earth has a smartphone, but just over half of them have access to proper sanitation. Between that stat and this report from Gartner, it looks as if a great many smartphone makers should think about starting their own toilet-making businesses. The research firm believes that while the smartphone market is still growing, that rate of growth has now dropped back to 2013 levels. That’s because China, long-regarded as a rich seam of un-tapped phone buyers has been exhausted, which is what’s prompted these firms to turn to India and Africa. If that all sounds a bit too business-y, here’s the simplified version: everyone who can buy a smartphone already has one, and those people who don’t probably can’t afford them.
Gartner has also tallied the winners and losers for the second three-month period of 2015, and Samsung falls victim to the law of large numbers. Despite shipping just four million fewer devices this year than last, it saw market share fall by 4.3 percent. Samsung’s lunch was mostly gobbled up by Huawei and Xiaomi, while Lenovo, fat and happy after its purchase of Motorola, still managed to watch its figures fall. The other big winner was Apple which, the firm claims, sold upwards of 12 million more iPhones than it did in the same period last year. Gartner also thinks that the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus managed to steal away high-end customers from other brands as well as gain plenty more fans in China.
Like the kids who got picked last for school sports, spare a thought for Windows Phone, which has just 2.5 percent market share. That’s still impressive when compared to BlackBerry, which is now marked down as having just 0.3 percent of the world’s smartphone business.
In terms of predicting the future, it looks as if there’s a growing divide between the dirt-cheap manufacturers and firms that are still producing higher-end Android phones. Huawei, ZTE, TCL and Micromax are all considered success stories having turned their attentions to India and other emerging markets. Sony, HTC and Samsung, to a lesser extent, are all marked down as losers that “struggled to achieve growth at the high end of the market.” Given how cheap it is to enter the Android phone business, there’s no shortage of companies who want to undercut the established players. If that continues, however, it’s not going to be long before we see more than just HTC being put on a watch list.
[Image Credit: Bloomberg / Getty]
Filed under:
Cellphones, Apple, Samsung, Microsoft, Google
Source:
Gartner
Tags: apple, Gartner, google, microsoft, samsung
Project Ara killing electropermanent magnets that hold device together
This week’s news on Project Ara were far from jolly. It’s never good to hear an awesome product has been delayed, but it’s even worse to learn the hesitation will be elongated for a whole year. Google’s modular phone isn’t expected to launch until 2016!
So what’s the problem with Project Ara? Google isn’t being specific on whatever issues they may be facing, but we may be getting a clue from today’s tweet, coming from the team’s official account. The social network publishing states the company is dropping (both literally and figuratively) electropermanent magnets. These are the parts that hold the modules and skeleton together. The tweet states the use of these magnets failed drop tests, so they are moving on to other techniques.
No more electropermanent magnets. #ProjectAra #FailedTheDropTest
— Project Ara (@ProjectAra) August 19, 2015
Though we saw the phone being assembled and functioning fully on stage, last May, it seems the mechanism just isn’t strong enough. This update doesn’t divulge much else, but we can assume that in order to make the contraption more solid, some convenience will have to be sacrificed. Switching modules will likely no longer be as simple as pulling off the piece at hand. It’s hard to assume, as the Project Ara team doesn’t give us much to speculate upon. We don’t even know what the exact shortcoming on these magnets were!
We will have to wait more to learn about Google’s plans on Project Ara. Here’s to hoping more details emerge before 2016, but at this rate we are beginning to think long waits are to come. Was Project Ara simply too much of an ambitious project?
Google Photos updated to 1.3 and brings ability to trim videos, reorder albums, and more
Google Photos has been updated to 1.3 and brings with it numerous new features. The main ones are the ability to trim movies, reorder content in albums, and sign in as a Google+ page.
A welcomed feature is you can now trim videos to be included in movies. Others are: you can reorder content in albums, login as a Google+ page, and Google Photos can now recognize collages or animations that Google Camera created.
I’m sure many businesses will be happy with the ability to sign in with their Google+ page while normal users should be excited about the ability to trim videos and move content in albums.
Come comment on this article: Google Photos updated to 1.3 and brings ability to trim videos, reorder albums, and more
Samsung Galaxy Note 5 does not have Google+ installed
Google has been phasing out parts of Google+, but it has come to our attention that it is not pre-loaded onto the Galaxy Note 5. You would think every Android phone would ship with all the main Google apps, but that doesn’t look to be the case.
The Note 5 does still come with all the other main Google apps as well as the new Google Photos app. The Galaxy A8 is another phone that Google+ is not pre-installed on.
I am sure a lot of users will be happy to see Samsung removing even more bloat from their phones. You can always download Google+ from the Play Store if you really want to use it.
Source: Android Central
Via: Sammobile
Come comment on this article: Samsung Galaxy Note 5 does not have Google+ installed
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