I clearly remember back in the day when I was scoring frags on Doom with my mouse and keyboard combo on a 486DX, I only had 40MB of hard drive space. Realizing that there were just too many games to install (which came on 3.5″ floppies) and too little space, being the poor student that I was, I could not afford a bigger hard drive. What remedy was there for me then? I hated uninstalling my other games, so I decided to check out DoubleSpace, a DOS utility that compresses data so that theoretically, I had “double” the amount of hard drive space – at the expense of performance, of course, since the computer had to go through the added motions of compressing and decompressing data. Fast forward to today, and you have this insatiable hunger for mobile data consumption – and for those who aren’t on unlimited data plans, going past your designated limit might burn quite a large hole in your pocket, even more so when you’re being billed with overseas data charges on your travels. Enter Onavo, an application for the iPhone which offers mobile users transparency and control over the data they consume.
It will connect your handset to what Onavo calls the ‘magical shrinking machine’, compressing all data you consume by as much as 80%, letting you pay less in the long run. There will be an Android build for beta testers sometime down the road, and we wonder what telco companies have to say about this.
Filed in ..