A Money Saving Phone Service Is Revived

In past years I have advised people looking to lower their phone bills to try the Web site Validas. It let them electronically enter their phone bills, which it analyzed, then suggested lower-priced plans that still gave them the same service or better.

Unfortunately, the company stopped offering the consumer service in March 2012, instead focusing on more profitable customers â€" businesses looking to save on phone bills.

But now the free Validas service is back under the moniker Vera, offered at the site savelovegive.com. This gets complicated, but stay with me. The site is allied with a charity, Seven Bar Foundation, which can put your savings to work as micro loans to women in need. You do have the option of kee ping the savings, though.

While it's noble that savelovegive wants to turn your savings into charitable gifts, it's as though Validas is doing as much as possible to complicate a simple concept. That concept is “save money on your phone bills.”

There is a splashy animated site to wade through explaining the many facets of the system. You can skip the animated rigmarole by going to the bottom of the page and clicking on the link that says “Get VERA” on the lower right.

The site currently analyzes bills only for AT&T and Verizon, but more companies will be included. Years of analysis have led Validas to estimate that 8 out of 10 families in the United States can save $200 a year by changing their phone plan without losing any services.

Tip of the Week: Bookmarks on the Home Screen

Google's Android operating system and Apple's iOS software both include a Web browser that lets you save bookmarks. For sites you visit frequently, however, it is often faster to get to your favorite page with the mobile equivalent of a desktop shortcut - an icon on the phone's home screen - instead of fiddling around with the browser's bookmark menu.

To save a bookmark as a home screen icon on an Android phone, open the built-in browser app, press the menu button and choose Bookmarks. Find the bookmark that you'd like to add to your home screen and press down on it until a new menu appears. Tap the “Add shortcut to Home” option to place an icon for the bookmarked page on the home screen.

On an iPhone or other device running Apple's iOS 6 software, open the Safari browser and go to the page you wish to use. In the Safari toolbar, which is at the bottom of the screen on the iPhone and iPod Touch, but at the top of the screen on the iPad, tap the Share menu i con, which looks like an arrow bursting out of a rectangle. On the menu that appears, tap the “Add to Home Screen” option to create an icon that takes you back to the page with one tap from the home screen.