by Bill
Adler
Onavo Count saved my bacon.
I'm pretty savvy about turning off the send and receive
feature using cellular data when traveling to other countries.
Evernote, for instance: I sync when on cellular or wifi
at home, but when in other countries, I set Evernote to sync only on wifi. I
tell my iPhone to update apps only on wifi, too. Dropbox photo backup: wifi
only. And so on. It's a very
memory-intensive process and I have to guess what apps might use cellular data
automatically.
While it's a pain to go through my iPhone app by app to
make sure that it only sends and receives automatically through wifi, that's
now an essential ritual for me before every overseas trip.
I bought an 800 megabyte cellular data plan from AT&T
before my most recent trip to Japan, where I am now. You can eat through 800
megabytes quickly by streaming YouTube videos, but 800 megs can hold you for a
while if all you do is use cellular data for email, maps, messaging, and Words
with Friends, like I do. Or I planned to do.
I took a look at my cellular data usage a few days after
arriving in Tokyo. (It's a good idea to reset your phone's cellular data
counter before you arrive in whatever country you're going to; otherwise you
won't be able to tell how much cellular data you're using.) I had used some 70 megabytes in a few days.
Hmm. I didn't do anything that should have used that much data. And at that
rate, I might eat through my entire 800 megabyte plan and soon move into
"international overcharge territory," a place I certainly didn't want
to visit.
But what app was leaking data? I poked around my apps
manually: It wasn't this and it wasn't that, but I did need to track it down.
How to do that without checking each of the 300+ apps on my iPhone manually?
With an app, of course: I found an app, which I highly recommend if you travel
with a limited data plan: it's called Onavo Count, www.onavo.com, and it tells you which apps are
running amok with your precious data. I fired up Onavo Count and instantly
found that somehow I hadn't turned off Google+'s cellular data backup feature
for photos. I really thought I had, but it's easy to make a mistake with apps
and phones offering so many feature options. Google+ was backing up my photos
all the time while I was roaming on a Japanese cellular network. Not cool. I
flipped off that switch, and now I have plenty of data to spare for the
duration of my trip.
Onavo also told me that FE Snap was consuming cellular
data. FE Snap is an smartphone app that lets you take a quick picture note and
save it in Evernote. The has a switch for "wifi only," but I forgot
to flip that switch before arriving in Japan. I use Evernote via FE Snap to
record places I've been while traveling, so I use FE Snap a lot! Each picture
note is about 500k big. Another switch flipped and everything was back to
normal.
There are several data monitoring apps that can alert you
when you're closing in on your data or voice plan's ceiling, but they're not
always reliable on the iPhone. I used to use one called Dataman, but it can be
tricked if you power off your phone. Now I just use the iPhone's built-in
cellular data tracking function. I haven't tried any data or voice use
monitoring apps on Android, but they may not suffer from the same limitations
and quirks as on the iPhone because Android is more open when it comes to
allowing apps to access the core operating system.
If you're in a data crunch, you can also give Onavo
Extend a whirl: Onavo Extend, www.onavo.com,
compresses data on the fly, giving you more bang for your proverbial data buck.
With these various data monitoring, reporting and
compression apps you can turn limited international data plans into actually
useful international data plans. The apps work domestically, too, if you're on
a limited domestic data plan.
---
Bill Adler is a writer. He is the author of "Boys
and Their Toys: Understanding Men by Understanding Their Relationship with
Gadgets," http://amzn.to/rspOft,
"Outwitting Squirrels," http://amzn.to/VXuLBh, and a mess of other books. He tweets at @billadler. His tech column is
published on Tuesdays.
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