Email article
On PC Opera arguably has one of the most underestimated browsers. On mobile platforms, however, Opera browsers flourish. With excellent useability and handy features – such as Opera Turbo – Opera is as an excellent choice of alternative browser for those who don’t like the built-in browsers that come with their devices. A recent update to Opera Mobile (v11.5) and Opera Mini (v6.5) brings a feature that I am sure many will appreciate: Data usage tracking.
In the age of data caps, it very useful to be able to see how much data you are consuming. Of course there are apps solely dedicated to helping you monitor network data usage so one may question why a web browser needs such a feature. While that is a valid point, being able to see how much data you consume while specifically surfing the web – or alternatively knowing how much data you save by using Opera Turbo – has a usefulness in of itself.
To use Opera’s new data usage tracking feature all you need to do is back sure you have the latest version of the browser (v6.5+ for Opera Mini and v11.5+ for Opera Mobile; data usage tracking is available on all the platforms Opera browsers are available on including but not limited to iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Symbian); data usage tracking is automatically enabled – in fact it doesn’t appear that you can disable it, even if you wanted to – and is available via the Help window:
When reading the data usage statistics, the Received size is the important stat; that tells how much data you have consumed. Original size and Received size are split up like they are so as to market the usefulness of Opera Turbo. If you have Opera Turbo disabled both Original size and Received size will be the same. However, if you have Opera Turbo enabled, then you should notice Received size being considerably less than Original size because Opera Turbo serves cached (i.e. smaller size) pages from Opera’s servers to speed up web browsing.
If you don’t have Opera Mini/Mobile already, you can grab them from the following links:
[via Engadget]
