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Notes -
I got a new phone recently. Not a great one, it's a downgrade on my previous phone in several areas and the march of enshittification in phone design is clearly continuing at pace.
But that topic has been done to death and I wanted to ask something else of the community. What uncommon or interesting things can you do with a modern smartphone?
It occurred to me as I was transferring everything over that I have barely changed how I use a smartphone since I bought my very first over a decade ago. I can emulate more games consoles now, and I grudgingly use some of the digital wallet features, but otherwise all the years of development doesn't seem to have changed anything at all. Are there cool features or applications that I'm missing out on?
I've been thinking along the same lines recently. All this power, and nothing to do with it.
I plan to leverage more translate technology this summer while traveling internationally.
Unique capabilities tend to be locked behind high-quality paid apps at the least it seems like. I have a digital reference for knot tying which is really awesome. It shows you a progression of how to tie a not, classifies them based on usage, and let's your rotate and adjust the view. Great for camping with a bunch of other idiot nerds.
PDF scanning has gotten great.
Someone went ahead and built the application I've dreamed about making myself for 3 years for managing trips. It's not the way I would have done it, and it needs some serious work in the desktop/web UX department, but even the free version is nice. I'll admit this is just a fancy spreadsheet so it's not a true net-new capability.
Wasn't Pdf scanning just fine as far back as in 2015?
It seems to me that major advances have been in the cameras and the video/photo processing. If you don't care about that then there is little to no functional difference between the current phones and phones from 2013.
In my experience, you could always convert a picture into a .pdf, but faithfully and easily converting a physical page into a properly formatted, clear .pdf is a much more recent innovation.
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