Onavo Extend 1.2.6 (for Android)

If you're trying to shave off some of the fat from your monthly smartphone bill, you can start by cutting down on mobile data consumption. Onavo Extend 1.2.6 (free) is like a diet pill for heavy Android data users without unlimited data plans. Its compression technology significantly reduces data consumption?claiming to save 500MB a month on average?with virtually no effort on your part. Onavo Extend is especially valuable when traveling abroad, where every megabyte of data comes at a premium.

Unfortunately, only a minority of Android users can use this app, as it requires Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and above. I tested Onavo on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus running 4.0.3. I turned on every compression setting, turned off Wi-Fi, and took Onavo for a spin through some Web pages, social networking apps, email, and maps.

How Does the Magic Work?
Onavo inserts itself between your Android device and the Internet. All the data that would normally go straight to your phone or tablet goes through Onavo's cloud-based servers first. Onavo compresses photos, emails, and other data hogs, and delivers lower-quality versions to your device. You can adjust the quality of images so that nothing is noticeable to the naked eye. The newest version of Onavo caches copies of frequently accessed data to your device's SD card, in a universal cache space so less data is required and content loads faster. Most Web apps already cache, but data is stored in different locations. Onavo's universal cache shares cached content with other apps and browsers to cut down data usage.

Furthermore, Onavo claims it caches almost in real time, so fetched data isn't outdated. As an end user, you'll notice this if you quickly flip back and forth between pages in your browser.? When the cache isn't updated fast enough, previous pages won't show the most recent information.?

Onavo doesn't compress video or audio streams (which is a good thing?I'd rather compromise on images than in music or video quality). By compressing all your photos, emails, and apps, Onavo does free up bandwidth for your multimedia appetite. It is especially effective on data hogs like push email, RSS readers, Twitter, StumbleUpon, and Facebook.

Quick Setup
To setup Onavo, you first need to let the app create a VPN connection to its servers, which is simply a matter of launching the app and hitting "Approve" when it asks for permission to make the connection. You lose VPN connection any time your phone is offline, so it takes a little training to remember to switch it back on every time you step out of a network-free zone. ?In my infinite laziness I wish Onavo automatically tried making a connection every time my phone went online.

Once you're connected, the app displays a split-screen homepage with your total bandwidth savings in megabytes up top, and at the bottom it contextualizes this number in terms of what you can use these extra megabytes for. There's also an option to fetch data reports that break down your data usage by source, over a week or month period. Later versions of Android calculate data use already, but Onavo's reports are much prettier.

Performance
In half, a day I saved 3.8MB on my device. To put this in context, I can now share an "extra 111 photos on Facebook" or read "an extra 8,957 tweets." At this rate, the app told me I would save 432.5MB this month. Pretty sweet.

In Opera Mini, which also uses server-side compression technology, the result is faster browsing speeds. The opposite is true in Onavo. In fact, in the Speed Test benchmark, my Galaxy Nexus with Onavo clocked 10.25 Mbps download speeds and 12.29 Mbps upload speeds. It was faster without Onavo, clocking in 17.12 Mbps down and 12.87 Mbps up. However in real-life, I didn't notice any major difference in speed.

Onavo lets you choose from three compression settings for images. On low quality (highest compression setting), Web images tend to look blurry and pixilated, though not unrecognizable. They look much better on medium quality, and I was barely able to discern a difference when using the high quality setting versus turning Onavo off entirely. Regular text on websites is unaffected by the compression, so you never have to worry about a page becoming unreadable. Even when you zoom in, text is every bit as clear as it is with data compression turned off.

Onavo compresses Exchange email; you can also set up your Gmail and Yahoo! accounts as an Exchange server if you want to compress their data. If you choose to use email compression, Onavo reformats your emails to plain text, so it loses formatting techniques like bold, underline, images. If you want to see the full, uncompressed email, you can scroll down a bit further and tap on the Download Full Message button.

?

How Secure?
By serving as a middleman between your device and the Internet, Onavo can technically see all the data flowing through your device. Onavo's execs have made a big deal out of telling everyone that the data is anonymized, but if you're still worried you can encrypt your data. Using HTTPS is the easiest way to start.

Onavo's system runs on Amazon's EC2 cloud servers. Its servers are protected by multiple layers of security, and nothing is actually stored except for aggregated and anonymized metadata, such as what types of apps you're using?this information is used to help illustrate your data usage and savings, as well as for research to help improve the service. Onavo cannot read or compress encrypted SSL traffic. The only exception is Microsoft Exchange mail traffic, which requires the user's explicit approval. This can be turned off from the app's Settings.

Onavo Extend is a must-have utility for those of us watching our data consumption, and a well-deserved Editors' Choice app for Android utilities. Onavo Extend doesn't compress video or audio, but it reduces a significant amount of overall data use by compressing ?emails, photos, and apps.

For more Android Software, see:
??? Onavo Extend 1.2.6 (for Android)
??? Plan B (for Android)
??? Google Wallet
??? Spotify 0.5.2 (for Android)
??? Enterprise Ping (for Android)
?? more

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ziffdavis/pcmag/~3/3F6gO8xRujI/0,2817,2403632,00.asp

martina mcbride terry jones elf on the shelf elf on the shelf 2012 grammy nominations stephen sondheim los angeles news