The 10 weirdest uses for a smartphone
You may think of yourself as technologically savvy, but if you're using your smartphone only to make calls, check your email, surf the Web, manage your schedule, take photos, shoot video, listen to music, watch movies, navigate via GPS, play video games, and update your Twitter and Facebookstatuses, then you're really nothing more than a Luddite. Here are 10 uses for smartphones that can help bring your backward lifestyle into the 21st century.5. Monitoring earthquakes
Do you want to contribute to earthquake science but can't be bothered to get an advanced degree in geophysics? Now you can just let your smartphone do all the work.
Researchers at Berkeley have developed an app that uses the accelerometer in your phone to measure the intensity of an earthquake. The app, called iShake, reports jostling to a central computer that will compare your phones movements to those of other nearby phones, creating a map that shows the strength and location of the quake.
The phone has to be resting on a flat surface for the app to work, which means that you can't cause a panic at the US Geological Survey by putting your phone in your pocket and jumping up and down.
4. Solving Sudoku puzzles
Ride on any subway train in America and, unless there's a live band performing on their iPhones, you'll see a whole lot of people hunched over their Sudoku puzzles. We won't pretend to know what these puzzles are actually for, but we assume that people send in their completed puzzles as part of a massive distributed computing project designed to end poverty. Only that could possibly explain the vast amounts of mental energy that people expend on it.
But now thanks to Google, these selfless puzzle-solvers will no longer have to devote every possible second of their free time slaving away at mind-numbing calculations for the greater good. The Google Goggles phone app now has a Sudoku solver. Simply point your phone at the puzzle, click "solve," and your phone will fill in the numbers for you, leaving you free to do something you actually enjoy.
3. Annoying teenagers
With their incessant texting, hip-hop ring tones, and superior technological skills, it's pretty easy for teenagers to annoy you with their cell phones. Well now you can annoy them right back, with an iPhone app appropriately named "Annoy-a-Teen."
It turns out that, just around the time that people lose the inclination to roll their eyes when asked to take out the garbage, they also stop being able to hear tones at frequencies above 16 kHz or so. Using the Annoy-a-Teen app, you can set your phone to emit a tone that is silent to you, but supremely irritating to them. Commenters on the download page at Apple are complaining that the app no longer works, but they're probably just getting old.
2. Piloting a satellite
In an attempt to prove that you don't need a lot of money to make a functioning satellite, British researchers have developed one that has a smartphone as its brain. The STRaND-1 (SurreyTraining, Research and Nanosatellite Demonstrator), which weighs just 8-pounds, is cheaper than your average family car. And yet, unlike the average family car, it goes into space.
According to the technology website TechNewsDaily, the satellite will be piloted by an Android smartphone, which has a software suite that "incorporates advanced guidance, navigation and control systems, as well as pulse plasma thrusters to propel it through space."
1. Blowing out a candle
We normally think of our phones as operating solely in a digital environment. If you want your phone to actually manipulate the physical world, the thinking goes, you need to link it to a machine with moving parts, say, a Lego Mindstorms kit or a remote control flying helicopter.
But then, every once in awhile, an app will come along that pierces the veil separating cyberspace from the rest of the world, leaving you slackjawed in ontological bewilderment. Blower, which turns your phones speaker into the world's worst personal fan, is just one of those apps. Just watch:
Source - [ csmonitor ]
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