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?
I use my smartphone to keep my book open when reading at a table. It does a pretty good job there.
Don’t limit yourself to technical uses.
SSH
I use mine with Microsoft Lens (I know, but one of their best products that doesn’t spy on you) as a document scanner and then sync it to my document server paperless-ngx.
It can angle correct, color correct, and has good filters for b&w and greyscale that often make it look like a real document scanner if your phone has a decent camera.
Much better than drive or any of the open source options to be honest, sadly…
May I recommend OSS Document Scanner + Syncthing? Both apps are FOSS and it looks to me like that they might be able to replace what Microsoft Lens does for you with the advantage that you are free of Microsoft software.
Wdym “that doesn’t spy on you”?
It doesn’t request location access, it doesn’t request contact or phone access, it doesn’t require you to sign into a microsoft account, it doesn’t constantly send data back home, etc… It only requests file permission and camera permission while you are using the app. A lot of apps harvest your data, and the entire Windows OS is built around harvesting your data and spying on your every click. This app doesn’t seem to do that as far as anyone can discern.
Its not open source, you don’t know if they’re going to log every thing you scan for targeted advertising (google makes its revenue from ads)
True, but through pihole, you can see if your phone makes pings to microsoft servers during use.
I run a real linux on my phone, so I can use it for anything I can use my laptop/desktop/unix for. I think what people forget is that phones are ultimately just computers with a WWAN radio, and the restrictive nature of Android and especially iOS obfuscate that.
postmarketos or do you run it as a vm?
Syncthing
What’s syncthing?
https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=syncthing (You are sitting right in front of a device that is connected to the Internet.)
This is about as witty as a box of rocks, just like it was when it was invented in 2007.
It’s a set of apps that help you sync files between devices. It does so without relying on a centralized server, which is a curse (because you need the devices to be on and online) and a blessing (because it can be fast and private). I use it every day. It’s great!
Fdroid, you scroll through it and find games and tools you didn’t know you needed until you’re either: in the middle of nowhere, or need a tool that you don’t have and just use an app for.
Yes! There’s so many cool apps on there! I wish the play store was similarly browsable.
I used my phone a lot to stream games from my PC to other rooms. Connect a Gamepad and Hdmi cable, and you can play all games from your library. Lag is minimal, but I haven’t tried it for competitive games.
how? what did you set up for that?
On PC popular options are Steam Remote Play and Moonlight.
for Xbox it’s built into the Xbox app, Greenlight is a good alternative on PC
for PS4/5 there’s the PS Remote Play app, but a lot of people prefer the PSPlay app on Android and Chiaki on PC for their improved functionality.
As for getting it on the TV any simple USBC->HDMI adapter will work.
You can use it as a webcam if you suddenly need to work from home and there’s a shortage of webcams.
Originally I had to install an app for that, but it shows up as a standard USB option on my Pixel now.
I moved my PC to a corner of my house without an Ethernet jack, I didn’t want to drill any holes, pull any cables, dug out an old smartphone, connected with a micro USB (!) cable, enabled USB tethering, connected the phone via WiFi and had a nice Internet connection
nice, but usb tethering has always been slower than ethernet in my experience
Samsung DEX.
I recently started to use my phone to monitor the conditions of my plant collection with a couple of Sensorpush devices. They report temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, and vapor pressure once a minute via Bluetooth, and I get a notification if conditions deviate from what I set. It has been very helpful at dialing in things in and responding to problems.
Calling other phones.
tf lol that’s like suggesting eating pizza with just your hand, instead of chopsticks like a proper civilized human
Only scammer use that function.
Weirdly enough, that’s a uniquely US problem.
I also received spam calls on my German number. It’s not that frequent but it happens.
You should report it to the Bundesnetzagentur, spam calls are illegal.
https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Vportal/AnfragenBeschwerden/Beschwerde_Aerger/start.html
Never!
Deviant
I can do full fledged software development complete with fully desktop-equivalent Neovim on my phone.
That said, it’s really not a pleasant experience. The CPU in my phone is pretty fast all things considered, but it still takes several times longer to compile a project than my laptop does; having this little screen real estate sucks; and since Termux doesn’t enable predictive text on the onscreen keyboard (and predictive text is worse than useless when writing code anyway), the best I can hope for productivity wise is a keyboard like Hacker’s Keyboard or Unexpected Keyboard that at least has functions like Esc built in. When I have a Bluetooth keyboard, I’m about half as productive as I am on a laptop. When I don’t, writing the same program takes ten times as long. But it does have all the same features my desktop setup does, and it is usable in a pinch.
Automation. My phone automatically triggers API calls, settings tweaks, launches apps to specific pages/playlists, and collects usage statistics to a local and private location all on its own. This means I only get a day and a half of battery life, but the tradeoff is well worth it in my opinion.
Yeah, I have Simplenote on my devices so that my plain text notes are always synced. Movies and TV shows we intend to watch, stuff to get at the store, unlock codes for lockers in the mail room of our building, stuff to discuss with my therapist, records I wanna find and buy, etc. I was at a show last night (Santigold and she kicked ass) and was jotting reminders for myself between songs. Having an instant notes repository is awesome.
