App helps families survive summer travel

It is that time of year when thoughts turn to summer travel and road trips. At our house, my husband takes care of the travel arrangements and makes sure the car is ready for an extended trip. The task of packing for the family usually falls on me. I make lists (Not surprising, I know.) to be sure that I have packed everything we will need. This usually includes a bag for my daughter’s movies, books and games to play with in the car during the long trip.

But last summer, my daughter discovered a world of games on the iPad while we were traveling, and the iPad instantly trumped all of the Disney movies she had already watched countless times. She found new games and apps, and I found out how quickly the data plan on our iPad can be used up by these data hogs. I had not noticed any data drain in the past because most of the time, we use the iPad when connected to Wi-Fi. But the open roads on a summer trip are a no Wi-Fi zone, and my daughter’s games quickly emptied the tank on our data plan. We still had four more hours of driving, and our road trip was feeling

longer with every sigh from my daughter in the backseat. This data drain made me wonder if there was a way to monitor the amount of data used by games and applications, thereby allowing you to choose a less data-intensive game for a long trip.

In my research, I discovered an app that monitors data usage by activity. But the app also compresses the data for your smart phone or tablet, thus minimizing how much data is used when not connected to Wi-Fi. Eureka! I discovered Onavo Extend, and our road trips have been happily ever after ever since.

Onavo Extend is a free application for smart phones and tablets that works invisibly in the background to reduce the amount of data your device uses when you are not connected to a Wi-Fi spot. It takes all of your data-heavy activities — like games, navigation apps, and browsing the Internet — and trims the data by routing it through servers where it is compressed before being sent to your device. Since it is being routed through Onavo’s servers, privacy and security are a concern. However, Onavo’s system is a platform of cloud-based

servers protected with multiple layers of security. Nothing is viewed or stored by Onavo except what types of apps are being used. This information allows Onavo to determine your data usage by application so you can monitor for any data hogs with detailed usage reports.

Installation of the app is easy. Simply download Onavo to your smart phone or tablet, and it begins working immediately. Onavo requires no maintenance. It pauses at times when you are connected to Wi-Fi and automatically resumes when the connection is lost. Onavo is customizable. You can configure settings, such as how much quality to sacrifice when Onavo compresses images. You can also choose whether or not you want to compress emails. If you decide to compress emails, Onavo reformats incoming messages to plain text. This means you will no longer see any bold, italics or other formatting in the messages, and images will not be automatically downloaded as part of the email. At the bottom of each compressed email, a message will now appear stating that the email is shown in plain text and prompting, if you prefer instead, to view in the

full, uncompressed format.

Regular text on web pages is not affected by the compression, even when you zoom in for a larger look. And although routing your data through Onavo’s servers is an extra step in the download process, the effect on speed is minimal, taking only a few unnoticeable seconds longer to load pages. The one downfall of Onavo is that it does not currently compress streaming videos, so Netflix and YouTube videos do not benefit from this.

Onavo reports it can increase your data usage by as much as 80 percent. Our family has averaged an increase in data of 50 percent, helping us make it much further along on our road trip before the “are we there yet” questions begin. Visit www.onavo.com for more information.

Holly Lawrence is a certified public accountant with James, Hardy, and Haley, CPAs in Shreveport. Her blog can be found at http://hollyklawrence. wordpress.com, and she can be reached at holly@ jameshardy.com.

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