By far my most favorite use is as a notepad that I always have with me. I use the Typewise keyboard to type quickly and accurately and it’s routinely very useful.
Anything y’all like to do with your phones that you feel like most people miss out on?
You can use most modern phones as a spirit level with the right app! It’s really useful when doing projects around the house, not having to run around to find a real one. Quite accurate, too!
Could you have made the advertisement just a bit more obvious, maybe?
Believe it or not, not every corner of the internet has been taken over by astroturfing as of yet!
I’m genuinely just sharing a cool keyboard app that has made my use-case far more fun for me. Another such app I used for a while was MessagEase, but unfortunately they went subscription-based (and also it was slower, even after a huge amount of practice).
What exactly are they advertising?
I had initially mentioned the custom keyboard app I was using. I have since edited the post to remove that, since I’m genuinely interested in people’s answers and don’t want them to think this is an ad.
Seriously, people getting their knickers tite over that shit still?
I use a Galaxy Ultra. currently an S22u previously a Note 9.
I use the stylus everyday. I tired a phone.sans atykus (Pixel Pro) for a month and got rid of it. The sylus is so handy
I have gone ----> Note 8, Note 9, S22u.
I draw work sketches all the time eg just this morning my parter sent me a photo of her mother’s toilet and asked me how to fix it. I typed a long set of instructions, she said huh… And can you draw me a sketch, stylus out and I did and she said now she understands and fixed it herself.
Someone givea me some info, stylus out, tap the screen and start writing eg phone number, address etc. No unlocking necessary. I have used the stylus as a camera remote on the phone but not often.
The styus makes the phone so useful it still beguiles me how peoplendo without. I use a phone and desktop.
This is definitely a huge one in my experience as well. Speech isn’t great at communicating visual detail. It’s amazing how the moment you start drawing you can just see it click in the other person’s mind.
I’ve never had a phone with a stylus before, but you make a good case for it!
I loved having a Note 2 ages ago. But since then, the styluses that are paired with phones seem so awfully plastic and cheap. I use a pretty standard phone nowadays, but I’m keeping my eyes open for a phone with a good high quality stylus that has its resting place in a niche in the phone itself. Any suggestions?
Haven’t needed it in a while, but a wifi analyzer to identify which band(s) are least crowded
Back when we worked it, the app saved so much time and helped explain so much.
Plugging headphones into a jack port and taking the back of to replace battery.
Those was kind of jokey answers, i really like using mine as a back up for documents via syncthing to view when im out if i need it. Much prefer this than uploading to cloud storage. I also use syncthing to have my save states for emulators sync from my phone to pc so i can contiune where i left off on the other device
An excuse not to interact with people.
“Sorry, my notifications were off while I was busy yesterday and didn’t have a chance to check it”.I got a waterproof case, so I use mine as a coaster.
My other half has new Ultra, I have an older Ultra model. Stuff i find invaluable that she hasn’t used once:
- S Pen
- Modes & Routines
- Secure folder
- DeX (to a lesser degree than the above)
I try to use my phone as a Swiss army knife. Stuff I rely on that most normal users likely dont realise their phone can do:
- Using Kodi the phone becomes fully fledged mobile media player. Great for vacations in case of poor weather (in conjunction with HDMI lead, controller/wireless keyboard)
- OsmAnd navigation has an offline Wikipedia plugin. I set up a shortcut in it so i can display/hide all wiki entries nearby. Brilliant when on vacation
- All my main apps will work offline in case of data outage: navigation, notes, password manager, books, music, podcasts, media etc etc
- Password manager has more uses than simply handling passwords
- Playing video sites in the background …with a timer if desired
- Browser with uBlock “etc”
- Manipulation of .pdf files
- A good launcher. Mine is always set up the same regardless of device - I can access any app within 2 swipes & 2 taps
- A good car dock
- Most don’t realise that a simple DNS entry can help reduce the amount of ads they see
- All manner of nerdy tech shit to interact with stuff on my network. No normal human needs to know that this usage factor exists
And most importantly …using the camera in landscape so images/video can be viewed properly on a TV or monitor. And not using digital zoom in the dark to record an entire concert from row Q
Cool list! I’ve taken to listening to music and videos with a sleep timer as well.
I wonder, what unusual things are you using a password manager for? Inputting common address data or something?
As a VPN client, I dont mean for a connection to a VPN service to annoamyse my traffic, but for my own self hosted VPN so I can call home and access stuff on my network. Comes in handy for stuff like my password manager where I dont like the idea of exposing it to the internet but still need access when im out and about.
I recently used my phone to wirelessly charge someone else’s phone that was about to die. Pretty useful feature in the moment. I only used that feature only that one time in the 2 years I’ve had the phone but it’s nice to know that is an option.
USB OTG on android phones is severely underrated.
- I can plug in a USB drive and transfer files around, I’ve used this to manage my retro handheld SD cards before.
- You can tether your hotspot over Ethernet to your computer with an Ethernet adapter.
- You can plug Ethernet into your phone to get faster connections.
- You can plug a mouse into your phone and get a cursor on screen. Not super useful tbh, but kinda cool.
- You can use your phone as an external webcam for your computer.
- It’s a bit more annoying than it used to be but you can use your phone as a universal IR remote with a small adapter and free apps (I miss my built in IR blaster from my S3).
Using a mouse is great for some games like OpenTTD!
When my pixel 5a decided to stop using the screen, I was able to do a full phone backup using the OTG to plug in a keyboard. Ridiculous but was a fun troubleshooting moment
Installing postmarketOS on it to turn it into a full fledged pocket PC. It now runs all your favorite Linux-compatible desktop applications except for those that don’t have ARM64 versions, and even then emulation layers can fix this. It’s not 100% as I haven’t been able to get Steam working (it starts but errors out before the login screen) though I have seen some people have success on other distros so maybe it’s a pmOS/Alpine/musl specific issue even though I was using distrobox with Debian to actually run it.
I’ve been getting into having a pdf of the various manuals for things around the house on my phone. I recently consulted the manuals for my fridge, a new dehumidifier and the lawn mower and it was pretty awesome not having to find and dig out a paper booklet each time. My phone is on me all the time plus I can get rid of the paper copies.
Been doing this too! Embarrassingly I still need to refer to my washing machine manual occassionally.
It’s a really useful habit!
In a similar vein, I’ve also got a receipt scanner app - to make sure I’ve got 'em saved if I need to return or service something.
My favorite use for my phone was wabbitemu, which was a perfect emulator for the ti86 calculator I’ve used almost daily since 1998. Apparently my new phone uses a new architecture and the app doesn’t work, so that’s rather disappointing.
What custom keyboard do you use, and which layout?
I use Typewise, with its default hexagonal layout that’s supposedly based on the frequency of letters in English. I’ve gotten alright with it - ~60 WPM on Monkeytype, which is enough that it doesn’t feel clunky to use it. And it’s quite fun to practice, too!
While I’m pretty sure it’s quite possible to write faster with more predictive keyboards, I really appreciate the precision this one allows. Especially since I’m bilingual, which leads to autocorrect and swype getting quite confused sometimes.
I’m still in the market for a better keyboard app. Another interesting one I’ve tried was MessagEase. It looks really cool and arcane to use, but I found it to be slower in spite of me putting more effort into mastering it.
