Five Innovative Ways to Use Your Smartphone

The smartphone truly is an amazing invention, and there’s no shortage of creative ways to use your smartphone. Whether you’re finding new and innovative smartphone uses in business or to enhance your personal life, the ways in which smartphones can enhance your day-to-day existence is nothing short of remarkable. Here are five extremely creative and smart uses for smartphones.

1. To Split the Check

Splitting a check at a restaurant has always been a hassle. If you just split everything evenly, some people end up overpaying or underpaying for their meal. How do you handle the tip? Instead of ruining a nice meal with painstaking conversations about “I had this and she had that,” download an app like Billr, which allows you to enter the number of people and the items they ordered — then does all the math for you. Or Divvy, which works by your taking a picture of the check with your cellphone and dragging items onto icons representing the diners who ordered them.

2. To Control Your TV

How often do you find a situation where you can’t for the life of you figure out what you did with your remote control? How about how crazy it is to have to deal with six remotes to manage all your different TV functions? You can make those issues a thing of the past by using your smartphone as a remote.

There are several free apps that simply require you input the manufacturer of your TV and connected devices, point your phone at the TV and you’re ready to go. Sure, you could misplace your phone, too, but since you take it with you everywhere, it’s a lot more likely to be there when you need it than your TV remote.

3. To Boost Business Productivity

With the right apps, your Smartphone can serve as a point-of-service, handheld version of many of the business machines you use every day. You can use your smartphone to scan documents into digital format, to remind you of business appointments, to record notes and to serve as an assistant that handles task management.

4. To See in the Dark

You’ve probably used your phone as a flashlight before. When you walk into your apartment late at night or you’re trying to find your friends in a movie theater after the lights have gone down, you turn on your phone and let the light of the screen illuminate things. Maybe you even use the flash of your camera if you’re desperate.

What you may not realize is that you probably have an actual flashlight app on your phone that you can switch on and off. It uses what is normally the flash of your phone camera to emit a powerful light beam just like a real flashlight. If it’s not on your phone already, there are plenty of free and easy flashlight apps you can install.

5. To Capture a Quote

You’ll need an iPhone for this one, but if you have it and you download the Heard App, you can record anything you hear, even after you’ve heard it! This app always keeps the microphone open, so if you hear anything good that you want to remember or play for someone else, you’ve got five minutes to save it to the recorder with this app.