DATA IS THE AREA WHERE MANY PEOPLE GET CAUGHT - IT’S EASY TO FORGET THAT THOSE GAMES AND YOUTUBE CLIPS CAN ADD UP. JENNETH ORANTIA LOOKS AT A FEW OF THE APPS THAT CAN HELP YOU MONITOR YOUR USAGE
ONAVO
PRICE Free DEVELOPER Onavo PLATFORM iOS and Android
A “magical shrinking machine” sounds more like something you’d find in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, but it’s the name the Onavo team has given to its cloud-based compression service. Using Onavo, any HTTP traffic that’s downloaded to your phone over 3G goes through the magical shrinking machine first, potentially saving you up to 80% on your data usage. One of the coolest features of Onavo is that it tells you exactly how much money you’ve saved since you started using the app, and you can break this down into the savings you’ve made per app as well. The only downside is that data latency speeds take a dive once you start using Onavo - we went from 90ms to 968ms using Speedtest.net.
3G WATCHDOG PRO
PRICE $3 DEVELOPER Richard Gruet PLATFORM Android
3G Watchdog Pro offers a few fancy tricks that you won’t find In other data monitoring apps. The advanced data usage prediction feature can tell you ahead of time whether you’re likely to go over your monthly data limit, based on the amount of data you use everyday, and the comprehensive selection of billing rules ensures that the total data reported Is as close as possible to what you end up seeing on your bill. These include the option to ignore usage from certain apps (ideal for plans that give you unlimited social networking access) and count data in blocks (for carriers that charge by data session). 3G Watchdog Pro also offers lots of ways to view your usage history, and you can choose from five different widget styles to display your 36 usage on your homescreen.
MYUSAGE
PRICE $1.49 DEVELOPER CMengLer
PLATFORM Android
If you’re having a hard time juggling your usage on multiple different accounts, myUsage can help you make sense of all the chaos. It’s designed specifically for Aussie users, and supports almost every different account type we can think of (save for bank accounts), including mobile phone, broadband, toll travel, parcel tracking and rewards cards. Like the Consume app for iOS it doesn’t calculate your usage so much as interface directly with each service provider’s online account portals and display the data that’s stored there. One of the advantages of myUsage over other data monitoring apps is that you can set it up with more than one mobile phone account, it also comes with handy widgets that display your account balances and usages on your homescreen.
DATAMAN PRO
PRICE $1.99 DEVELOPER XVision PLATFORM iOS (iPhone) DataMan Pro is a simple app that lets you track both 3g and Wi-FI usage on your iPhone. You plug-in the start and end dates of your billing cycle, set daily, weekly and monthly data limits, and get ‘real time alerts” whenever you go over those limits. But DataMan Pro is a little too simple to be effective. Its major shortcoming it that there’s no way to get it to count 3G usage on its own for the usage alerts - it lumps 3G and Wi-Fi usage together. The “real-time alerts” aren’t in real-time either - it checks your data activity every 10 minutes. This means you can go way over your data limit if you’re downloading a large file - we went from using 10% of our daily data to suddenly getting a “you’ve used 124% of your daily allowance” alert within the space of 10 minutes. (PCta)
CONSUME
PRICE $2.99 DEVELOPER Bjango PLATFORM iOS
Keeping track of mobile phone usage is the least of Consume’s talents. It can also track broadband, toll and package tracking accounts, rewards cards and store cards, essentially turning it into a one-stop shop for almost all your accounts that are worth monitoring. There’s nothing to configure aside from entering your account details, as it connects directly to your service provider’s database to retrieve all of your information. For mobile phone accounts, it shows how much credit and data you have left, how much you use on an average day, and how much per day you have left in your billing cycle.
SPB WIRELESS MONITOR
PRICE $12 DEVELOPER SPB Software PLATFORM Symbian
PRICE Free DEVELOPER Onavo PLATFORM iOS and Android
A “magical shrinking machine” sounds more like something you’d find in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, but it’s the name the Onavo team has given to its cloud-based compression service. Using Onavo, any HTTP traffic that’s downloaded to your phone over 3G goes through the magical shrinking machine first, potentially saving you up to 80% on your data usage. One of the coolest features of Onavo is that it tells you exactly how much money you’ve saved since you started using the app, and you can break this down into the savings you’ve made per app as well. The only downside is that data latency speeds take a dive once you start using Onavo - we went from 90ms to 968ms using Speedtest.net.
PRICE $3 DEVELOPER Richard Gruet PLATFORM Android
3G Watchdog Pro offers a few fancy tricks that you won’t find In other data monitoring apps. The advanced data usage prediction feature can tell you ahead of time whether you’re likely to go over your monthly data limit, based on the amount of data you use everyday, and the comprehensive selection of billing rules ensures that the total data reported Is as close as possible to what you end up seeing on your bill. These include the option to ignore usage from certain apps (ideal for plans that give you unlimited social networking access) and count data in blocks (for carriers that charge by data session). 3G Watchdog Pro also offers lots of ways to view your usage history, and you can choose from five different widget styles to display your 36 usage on your homescreen.
PRICE $1.49 DEVELOPER CMengLer
PLATFORM Android
If you’re having a hard time juggling your usage on multiple different accounts, myUsage can help you make sense of all the chaos. It’s designed specifically for Aussie users, and supports almost every different account type we can think of (save for bank accounts), including mobile phone, broadband, toll travel, parcel tracking and rewards cards. Like the Consume app for iOS it doesn’t calculate your usage so much as interface directly with each service provider’s online account portals and display the data that’s stored there. One of the advantages of myUsage over other data monitoring apps is that you can set it up with more than one mobile phone account, it also comes with handy widgets that display your account balances and usages on your homescreen.
PRICE $1.99 DEVELOPER XVision PLATFORM iOS (iPhone) DataMan Pro is a simple app that lets you track both 3g and Wi-FI usage on your iPhone. You plug-in the start and end dates of your billing cycle, set daily, weekly and monthly data limits, and get ‘real time alerts” whenever you go over those limits. But DataMan Pro is a little too simple to be effective. Its major shortcoming it that there’s no way to get it to count 3G usage on its own for the usage alerts - it lumps 3G and Wi-Fi usage together. The “real-time alerts” aren’t in real-time either - it checks your data activity every 10 minutes. This means you can go way over your data limit if you’re downloading a large file - we went from using 10% of our daily data to suddenly getting a “you’ve used 124% of your daily allowance” alert within the space of 10 minutes. (PCta)
PRICE $2.99 DEVELOPER Bjango PLATFORM iOS
Keeping track of mobile phone usage is the least of Consume’s talents. It can also track broadband, toll and package tracking accounts, rewards cards and store cards, essentially turning it into a one-stop shop for almost all your accounts that are worth monitoring. There’s nothing to configure aside from entering your account details, as it connects directly to your service provider’s database to retrieve all of your information. For mobile phone accounts, it shows how much credit and data you have left, how much you use on an average day, and how much per day you have left in your billing cycle.
PRICE $12 DEVELOPER SPB Software PLATFORM Symbian
It’s ludicrously expensive compared to the data monitoilng apps for other platforms, but if yOU’ve got the cash to spend up-front, SPB Wireless Monitor is a powerfull and well-rounded app that’ll pay itself off quickly with money you’ll save on excess usage charges. it monitors both 3G and Wi-Fi, although the warning alarms for excess usage are, rather sensibly, limited to 3G only, with the option of setting up daily and monthly limits. SPB claims to support over 330 data plans from around the world, but we had to create our own for our Telstra account. Not that this is much of a drawback - the best thing about SPB Wireless Monitor is that you can tailor your data plan to a tee, as it supports off-peak pricing models, and charging by blocks, sessions or time.