Most of us take pictures with our phone to store memories of our experiences and share with loved ones, or foe! But there are other uses for your smartphone’s camera. One of them is to take pictures of documents for capture, just like your desktop scanner does at work or at home. Well maybe not as good yet, but it definitely does the job and will only get better.
We scoured the web and found a brilliant article highlighting how this can be done efficiently!
Thanks to J. D. Biersdorfer of NYtimes, you can use your phone in other ways. Click here to read his article.
We talked about Project Ara a while back! Since then, like always in the tech age, things have changed and the world has advanced even more. Google has changed its parent name to Alphabet and made Google a division of that. Project Ara has also changed leadership and changed the focus of how the project would take off.
Instead of a full modular phone, the screen and processor (brain in the phone) will not be changeable but the rest of the phone will be. “We’ve integrated the phone technology in the frame. That frees up space for modules that will create and integrate new functionality that you cannot get on your smartphone today,” Said the project’s lead engineer, recently at a conference!
The good news is that the project is definitely moving forward, and we have started to see some devices trying to incorporate the idea. See below
The LG G5 lets you swap the battery pack and add a camera grip in seconds.
However, the Alphabet’s Ara wants to do more. As of the time of this article, the prototype is aiming at swapping things like a secondary e-paper display, a high-resolution camera, loud speakers, expandable storage, or even a kickstand. And it is proposed to be out commercially by end of 2017!
In another news, a new research is making screens that can be remodulated just like a rubik cube! Crazy!
We say good work to everyone involved in this. This futuristic idea will definitely change the standard we have today and make the same devices more useful to different people!
Now a phone is in works that makes good use of the bendable screen making the phone itself bendable without breaking. In fact the bending is measured and used to control the phone! You can flip through an electronic book like you would with a paper back!
Amazing isn’t it?
We really don’t have to wait much longer for devices we can roll without breaking them!
Meet the Yotaphone. A phone designed to meet both your reading and smart phone needs at both ends.
Yotaphone has a normal smartphone screen you see in many new phones in front of it and an e-ink screen at the back, the kind you see in mobile devices designed just for reading.
You can use the screen at the back for both reading your favourite book and viewing your notifications without unlocking your phone. You could even personalise the back screen to show your favourite picture all the time, so you basically have your own digital case. Yes the back screen is always on.
You must be thinking battery matters now. Well the e-ink screen doesn’t use the phone’s fairly large battery as much as the normal screen giving your 5 days of using the back screen alone. The phone even lets you use the back screen for all functions which means you could use your phone for 5 days without need for a charge.
Is this useful in anyway I hear you say, here at Computer Potato we believe this is one innovation that has got a place in the current market and beyond. With time we will see this design used in many mobile devices giving you more functions. So we say kudos to the brains at Yota for their idea! See it yourself below.
Like recent years, this year promises even more devices wanting to make our lives a bit easier. Here at The Computer Potato, we aim to bring you the best innovations in their simplest form.
We are pleased to bring you Strone, a device that lets you divert your calls over the internet to a laptop, phone or tablet when you are travelling to avoid roaming charges.
You simply put your SIM card in this device, and all your calls and texts are routed to an the strone app which can be installed on a laptop or mobile device. All you would need is an internet connection in the country you are, whether via a local SIM card or WiFi.
Say bye to those extraordinarily expensive bills you get when you are on holiday or on a business trip and never miss a call again. The computer potato believes this fancy little device has definitely got places to go, not just with you on holiday!
Have you ever been in a hurry to attend a meeting in time and forgot your phone at home, or your phone died out of battery when you are expecting an important call?
Another piece of application is here to make sure you don’t go without communication if this happens to you again. The new app is rightly called Hotel My Phone.
Hotel My Phone lets you borrow a friend’s phone and use your number on it.
It works by cloning your phone and letting you temporarily borrow a friend or someone’s phone with the same app to make calls and text with your own number. Once checked in to the borrowed phone, you can see your own contacts, and communicate with your contacts from the app on the borrowed phone. Once you check out of the app, your information is permanently erased and the app will let you know this too.
Hotel My Phone promises this on their website “Whether you forgot your phone or have a dead battery, it doesn’t matter! Have the added insurance of your spouse’s phone or your best friends’. Stay in contact with your closest friends, now that you are all on Hotel My Phone, you’ll never miss a message or call!”
This sounds all good, but you must know there are some charges to pay if you want to do some specific things like making a call, which depends on the location you are checked into. There are also costs for checking in to phones that are not on your network that you can build within the app.
Conclusion: Claiming to be the first phone sharing app, we at The Computer Potato think Hotel My Phone is an innovation that will be well received and will take off as more companies look into the idea and come up with better ways of making this great idea even more useful than it is right now.
It seems there can’t be any week the technology giant Google couldn’t make itself known to the world with its innovations or news. Well they are hard at work again and we must give credit to whom it’s due.
The Computer Potato chose to bring you this news because Google is competing for the benefit of the common man or woman.This time the research is for you to experience virtual reality with just a piece of cardboard and your smart phone without spending a fortune.
Google Cardboard
All you need is a cardboard sold by Google and your smartphone, download some apps and viola you are in the your own world, literally.
How it works: Google says all you need is to “Get it, fold it and look inside to enter the world of Cardboard. It’s a VR experience starting with a simple viewer anyone can build or buy. Once you have it, you can explore a variety of apps that unfold all around you.”
Clever uh? Not just clever but very innovative. The Computer Potatoe gives kudos to those who work hard to change our world with technology. This one gets 5 stars
It is always a battle with smart phones coming out almost every month from different manufacturers, each vying to be the best coming out with new innovations and classic features to attract loyal customers.
Time to time, a phone pioneers an idea and most others follow. We saw this with the birth of the iPhone in 2007, every manufacturer went crazy after the success of the iPhone and the race has been even hotter ever since.
In a saturated market, there still comes a time when a manufacturer does something that helps revolutionise smartphones. We at Computer Potatoe think Samsung has done this. We introduce to you the Samsung Note Edge.
Thank goodness for the smart phones as they have changed the way we do things on the move. There are thousands of apps that can be downloaded on your mobile devices and they all promise to do something useful. Depending on what you are trying to achieve with your phone, you can about download apps to do them for you. As a tech lover, I have tried many apps and sometimes been gobsmacked and other times disappointed. And apps do give your phone a new feature each time. Asides the games and numerous promising apps, I think there are some apps your phone must have. These types of apps I have chosen as must haves. Enjoy
Flashlight;
Yes, for me this has to be one of the most useful app categories on any mobile. This app turns your phone into a flashlight using the flash next to your camera. So when you are looking for something under the chair, or simply walking a dark path, you can trust your phone to shine a light!
Shazam;
This is more for music lovers. Ever been out and about and you hear a song play and you just wished you knew the title so you can go buy it. Well Shazam does that for you, as long as you have got internet connection you can ask it to listen to a piece of music and it can tell you the artist, song title and album
Fitness App;
As more and more people want to get fit anyway they can. There are apps that turn your phone into a fitness trainer or tracker. They can tell you how much you walked, slept, or ran on your morning jogging. Some do come with additional hardware you have to wear on your wrist so please check to make sure.
And lastly any chatting app. This is a way to keep in touch with friends and family. The chances you already have one on your phone now. If you don’t, make sure you get one most of your friends and families have so you can chat with them and share moments for free.
Displays have certainly gone through changes within the years. From the black and white screens on your old “much-larger-than-it-should-be” TV, to the colour TV, to the handheld devices like your phone, then to clearer colourful screens on small devices, to High definition screens on your flatscreen TV and your phones, 3D screens, Quad High Definition. Now it is changing again and many big companies have been working hard to make sure they find the next thing first.
LG Flexible OLED Screen
Well drum roll please, the next big thing is a screen that bends. Yes, a screen that you can bend without breaking it. In fact, LG has just announced an almost paper like screen that you can roll cylindrically without affecting its functions. They take pride in the fact the 18 inch screen can roll into a cylinder with a 6cm diameter (that would be the cylindrical size of your typical air freshener can). They are not the first though, as Samsung had announced they would be making bendable screens in 2013.
As The Computer Potato only brings you information in a simple way, there is not much to be said about this technology yet. All we know about them is still technical at this stage.
The Use; Well you might think there is little use for this, but there are quite a few. One of them is viewing angle. Generally screens are dim when light reflects on them, with the “bendy” screens you can easily bend it into view.
Conclusion; Even though this is a very good idea, we won’t be rolling our phones into a cylinder any time soon. Why? Even if the screen bends, the other components of the device cannot so they have to attach heavily on one side (not ideal for ergonomics), until we find a way to make everything bendable in the future.
