Opera Max is one of the applications that Samsung is bundling on two of its latest entry-level smartphones, the Galaxy J2 and the Galaxy J1 Ace. The two devices have recently been made available in various emerging smartphone markets including India and Kenya. The key message is that even as uptake of data-intensive applications by users on their smartphones increases, there is need to be mindful of the amount of data consumed by some apps and services that are traditionally known not be kind to data caps and can easily result in users exhausting their data bundles/plans or incurring high monthly bills. It is not just the case for users of entry-level smartphones but just about everyone. That is where Opera Max comes in. It polices all the installed applications on a devices and throttles their data-sapping habits to bare minimum.
Effective today, the famed application is getting even more superpowers. With media streaming apps and services exploding in popularity over the last two years much to the happiness of cellular data providers (carriers, basically) and other interested parties who are making a killing off this, there has been increasing need to tone down data usage. That has been happening already with applications like YouTube and Netflix and with the new update to Opera Max, YouTube Music, Pandora, Slacker Radio, Gaana and Saavn join the two video streaming services in the data savings chart. Opera Max promises to save users up to about 50% of the data they would’ve otherwise spent streaming audio on those particular apps and services.
Opera Max uses streaming audio optimization powered by Rocket Optimizer, which manages streaming audio traffic in the same way that it optimizes video traffic. It supports both MP3 and MP4 stream formats, and it can also convert streams to the more efficient AAC+ codec, which is able to deliver high audio quality over a low bitrate connection to any compatible device.
Since almost every one of us who always has to rely on office Wi-Fi in order to stream music could do with a little boost in making sure they don’t run out of data soon, Opera Max is waiting at the Play Store.
