4 Unorthodox Methods Of Using Your Phone Camera!

Did you just always assume that phone camera was there to take snaps alone? Fortunately, there is more to your phone cameras than merely taking photos. Your smartphone camera can be a translator, scanner and more.

We have compiled a list of ways you can use your phone’s camera other than clicking photos.

1.    Translate Text

Remember how you looked at the foreign test and automatically assumed that it is beyond your reach or comprehension? You would then seek help or ask someone around to decipher what it actually meant. With your smartphone’s camera, now you can just face the text and watch the translation happen.

The credit goes to an app called World Lens (available both on Android and iPhone), that enables your camera to translate any text for you in your native language (you can always select that from settings). Nothing worth achieving is free in this world so yes for additional languages you’d have to pay $5.

So if you’re a traveler, you are bound to come across a lot of text that you’d require help with in order to navigate. Hence, make your camera see what you see as alien and bang! That whole wide chunk of text will immediately be converted into one of your own. Amazing eh?

2.    Edit Printable Books And Documents

So you’ve come across this bunch of books or certain documents that you need to extract the excerpts from. What to do? Write those bits down and save it to your computer. But with smartphone camera’s OCR (optical character recognition) technology you will not have to type it anymore.

What it does is that it helps your handheld device identify alphanumeric characters in an image. Apps on both Android and iPhone then make it possible to convert that image into editable text. Therefore, pick an app, commence scan and turn text into searchable, editable one.

3.    Read Barcodes And Compare Prices During Shopping

There’s always an advantage in stepping into an actual store to browse for items and compare prices in order to make a purchase decision. But what if you can do it from the comfort of your home through the internet?

Even while in a store, when the price tag is missing and you want to figure out how much a particular item cost, you can do that by simply scanning that item’s barcode to get its cost/price information via phone’s camera.

RedLaser is one such app in that will complement your phone’s camera in reading barcodes for you and deliver results quickly. If you don’t want to buy at the time, the app will let you know the deals in your vicinity that are the nearest.

4.    Keep Track Of Important Information

When you are taking pictures of people and places you are capturing those faces and scenes to remember. Why not employ this technique in keeping track of important info such as contact numbers, insurance cards and place them in the album labeled ‘Emergency’ for quick retrieval later, no?

It’s a better way to store emergency information so that you don’t have to go through any hassle at the time of need. Apps are available in this regard as well to store these screen shots in an organized manner. You can set your screen lock message as ‘refer to the emergency album when in emergency’.

It can help you in relatively less extreme cases. For instance, if you are on drugs, take the picture of your prescribed medicine bottle, to recall the name. Also, you can store information that you might want to have on-hands when filling out forms; license plate number, MAC address on your router, your pet’s ID tag etc.

The need for maintaining notes and writing them down on a piece of paper is eliminated as a result.

Above are some clever ways you can utilize your phone’s camera.

Author Bio:

Catherine Daisy is a Tech Geek and has a keen interest in gadgets. She loves travelling and try out different foods. Blogging is his favorite activity to kill time while he is free. In addition, she delivers UAE assignment writing services to students.