Ad blocking apps for your smartphone and tablet
Ads slow web pages from loading, consume battery power, eat up data plans, and can even carry malware and viruses.
In short, there are plenty of reasons to make them want to go away.
In his report this week, PC Mike Wendland brings you three popular choices for ad blocking.
Adblock Plus blocks nasty stuff like malware and tracking that can hide behind ads. Doing so helps reduce risk of malware infection, while enhancing your privacy. You can change settings at any time, so you can allow ads that are deemed more acceptable and less intrusive. The app is free for iOS and Android.
Purify is another efficient blocker available for iOS, allowing you to browse up to four times faster and save up to 50 percent of your data usage. It also blocks those annoying ads that take up already limited screen space on your mobile device. It also has customizable settings. The app is $1.99 for iOS.
Stop Ads blocks annoying ads, suspicious scripts, and having to wait for websites to load content after banner ads are displayed. The developers claim it can decrease page load time by up to five times, and thus reduce mobile data usage by half. Stops Ads can even be synchronized across multiple Apple devices. The app is 99 cents for iOS.
Mike Wendland
Mike is a veteran journalist whose video "PC Mike" reports have been distributed weekly to all 215 NBC-TV stations since 1994, making him one of the most experienced tech reporters in the country. His tech stories and videos have appeared on MSNBC, CNBC, the Today Show, The New York Times, USA Today and in numerous national newspapers and magazines. In addition to the PC Mike tech blog, he also publishes the Roadtreking.com RV Travel Blog in which he travels North America in an RV reporting about interesting people and places.
