What is the most empowering thing about your smartphone? Obviously it’s connectivity you get in the palm of your hands! Whether you have to browse your favourite websites, check your feeds, watch a video online or just to check your mails — it all is really convenient and you simply don’t need to be at home or have to fire up your laptop! But being mobile means you won’t always have a WiFi connection available with you. So, you need large chunks of data to be accessed, and for that, you need an internet data connection from your cellular provider. The problem is, that the data tariffs haven’t gone cheap the way one one would’ve expected with the rise of smartphone as a major source of internet usage!

Opera Max

Okay, so you must be wondering what Opera Max does!? You have used Opera Mini before and already know about the Opera Turbo feature in Opera browsers. What’s new about Max, you might ask.

OperaMax

Opera Max is an all new app by the Opera which can compress almost all web data that your phone receives by creating a new VPN connection to its servers. It supports quite a few major apps on android and compresses the images, videos, text etc. that they receive to decrease the total data usage on your device. All the data that your phone receives, come from Opera’s servers, which in turn keeps a pre cached, compressed version of them. So the next time you run Instagram or browse with Chrome or just flip through your news sources on Flipboard while Opera Max is switched On, the data you receive will be significantly less than the original sizes. Yes, Chrome has this feature built in after the last update, but it only covers the browsing you do within it. Thus Opera Max can definitely help you remove the restrictions that you keep yourself in for avoiding carrier data charges!

One downside to Opera Max, for certain users who are dubious regarding their online security, might be that all your encrypted data too, goes through Opera servers. Although we’d say that Opera is one software giant we can definitely trust our data with; if you have any apprehensions about your security, we shall advice you to refrain from getting this app. Currently the app is available only in the USA and certain countries of Europe (including Norway) on devices running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich or higher.

The app is free at the moment as it’s in beta but we won’t be surprised if it soon turns into a monthly subscription service. Below is the download link if you are intrigued.

► Download Opera Max