Beyond 3G mobile networks will be data service centric. It is anticipated that UE will stay in the Connected State relatively long while supporting data services, so efficient power saving mechanisms for the Connected State are more significant in order to prolong the active time of a handset. Discontinuous Reception (DRX) is a dominant approach for power saving in the Idle State and the Connected State. In this paper, a novel Counter-Driven Adaptive DRX (CDA-DRX) scheme is proposed and analyzed. It intends to present a generic and easy-to-implement adaptive DRX scheme that keeps up with the change of user activity level. This autonomous and adaptive power saving scheme distinguishes itself from all other researches surveyed so far from literature by minimizing signaling overhead and easy balancing between packet delivery latency and power saving performance according to QoS requirement of established data services.