Following are some notes about getting by with a limited monthly 100MB data plan with an Android smartphone. To be expanded as I get more familiar with the platform.
Rough daily data metric is (monthlyData – emergencyData) * 12 / 365, or about 2.63MB per day in my situation.
Set up billing cycle and cap information in Data Usage panel: You can configure Android to shut off Cellular data entirely when a certain threshold is reached.
Blacklist bandwidth-hungry Apps from using Cellular data in the background: also available in the Data Usage panel. Watch for any anomalies day-to-day, and blacklist misbehaving apps.
Pre-filtered web browsing: Chrome and Opera Mini can be configured to minimize image sizes via intermediary proxy servers. Opera Mini can strip out images entirely. Probably not good for any sensitive information, but OK for a quick trivia search.
Google Docs syncing is an incredible hog: Watch out for cloud syncing. Docs uses significant bandwidth to download/upload even a simple todo list.
(e 2017/Feb/13: Emergency data)
