3 Smart Uses For Your Smartphone's Camera That You Might Not Know
Ok, everyone knows that the basic use of your smartphone’s camera is to take photos or selfies, but there are also other, not quite known uses for it, which you should know.
We present you three of these ways, along with the apps that you need to make the magic happen.
Translate
If you cannot read a sign, a menu or some other piece of text in a foreign language, open Google Translate and it will process the text through the device’s camera, and translate it for you. To do that, from the app’s home screen, tap on the camera icon and take a photo of the text you want to translate.
Not every language that is normally available in the app is supported in this feature (only 29 languages ​​are supported, versus 103 which are available in total), however it’s an extremely convenient feature, plus you can use images that you took in the past.
Two alternatives with similar functionality are Text Grabber + Translator (Android, iOS) and WayGo (Android, iOS).
Download Google Translate for Android here.
Download Google Translate for iOS here.
Scan Documents
You can use your smartphone as a portable scanner, whether you want to upload documents into the cloud to save them, convert them into editable text, or simply remember your ticket’s details- and all these from your device’s camera.
Evernote’s Scannable app for iOS is a decent choice for this purpose, but Google Drive has the same scanning functionality as well (even though it is currently available only for Android).
CamScanner (Android, iOS) and Scanbot (iOS) are two other excellent alternative choices.
Download Scannable for iOS here.
Download Google Drive for Android here.
Star Gazing
This is one out of many ways that you can use your smartphone in combination with augmented reality apps. Simply install an app like Skyview, point with your device’s camera at the sky, and then take a look at the stars, constellations and more, without even having a telescope.
There are several other similar star gazing apps, and a lot more augmented reality apps ready to process information based on the smartphone’s camera feed, such as Wikitude (Android, iOS) and Blippar (Android, iOS).
Sky Map (Android) is also a very good star gazing app, originally developed by Google.
