Apps To Limit 3G Data Use With Android Gingerbread | Phone/Device Issues and Features | Consumer forum

Since the announcement of the data plan I've worked at getting my 3G data usage below 100MB per month. I'm sharing my experience in case it's helpful to anyone else.

I have been using SpeakOut since I bought my Samsung Galaxy Ace a couple of years ago. It came with Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread installed. It's not a very powerful phone so all my solutions need to use few resources.

Some of these apps are not needed if you're running a newer version of Android because the features have been added to the OS.

These are the free apps that I use to tune my data use.

1. Juice Defender - Set to disable mobile data when the phone is not in use.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.latedroid.juicedefender

2. 3G Watchdog - Shows approximate data usage for both 3G and Wifi. Does not limit data usage but helps me know what's going on in the background so I can find data leaks. I also tried one of the Onavo products that logged the data use by app but found it slowed down my handset too much.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.rgruet.android.g3watchdog

3. DroidWall - No longer being maintained but small and works beautifully for me. DroidWall has a few bugs but nothing that stops it from doing its job of selectively enabling 3G and Wifi for each app. This is my big data saver because I only allow aggressive apps such as Google Play to run on Wifi. Other apps that don't need data except for ads can be denied access completely. There are forked firewall projects that use this code base but I found they were much larger than I wanted.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.googlecode.droidwall.free

4. K-9 Mail - An IMAP email app with excellent control over background polling and refresh frequency. Set different background polling frequency for each email account or turn it off completely.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fsck.k9

5. An app that can "freeze" an app you don't want to run. Not absolutely necessary but I found that some apps could not be stopped without freezing them. I freeze Gmail, Talk and YouTube because I won't use them and they often auto-start and use up memory on my phone. I use Link2SD to freeze apps but the choice is yours.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.buak.Link2SD

If you have any others please add them to this thread.