Wireless Internet on your mobile phone can get pretty expensive if the data plan requires you to pay for every kilobyte of data. One effective way to reduce your phone bill is that you turn off images in your phone’s browser or, if you don’t want to spoil the web experience, you may consider getting Opera on your phone (m.opera.com).

When you access a website through Opera, it first downloads that page on to its own servers where the page is compressed and then delivered to your phone. Thus, your phone has to download lesser amount of kilobytes when you access the same website through Opera.

Opera says that their servers compress web pages by as much as 80% but there was no real way to verify that number. Until now.

Opera has updated their Android browser and it now gives you an exact idea of how much data you have downloaded during your current browsing session and how much bandwidth you have saved because of Opera’s compression. It also keeps track of the total data usage which may help you pick a more optimal data plan in your next billing cycle.

To see your phone’s data usage through Opera, launch the browser, click the Opera icon and choose “Data Usage” under the Help section.

This will obviously only track data that passes through the Opera browser on your phone – if you want to track the entire data usage of your Android phone, include data consumed by apps, Onavo might be a good option.