Just How Smart is that Phone, Anyway?

Raise your hand if you are one of us who has recently said – and with a note of wonderment in our voice – “I did something really unusual with my phone today, I made a phone call”.

I am hardly a digital/tech native, but I’ve been paying attention. I remember shelling out 49.95, back when that was two days’ pay, for a pocket calculator that could do all of these things: Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Calculate Square Roots. Oh, and it had a memory button, although no one was ever able to explain why you would want that. Actually no one ever used the square root function either but it was somehow comforting to know that you could if you needed to.

This was probably back around 1972, and the fact that by 1975 banks were giving these calculators away for opening a savings account probably set the pace for what was coming. My first personal computer, a Northgate, weighed about 70 pounds and sat on the floor next to my desk. The last one I bought (Samsung) cost about half as much in real dollars, not adjusted, and weighs approximately 67.8 pounds less.

And the first portable phone I owned came in a bag, which you had to strap over your shoulder to carry. It was similarly heavier than the one I have now – about 30 times as heavy. Interestingly, both that first phone and my current model were made by Motorola. That first portable didn’t even have a calculator function, although I probably could have figured out how to duct-tape a calculator onto the receiver – by that time you could get those basic calculators for nothing, they were given away as advertising premiums.

I guess it’s just an inevitability (see Moore’s Law) that these portable devices we carry around are almost tangentially considered phones any more, since they can do so much more. Pretty much everyone I know uses their phone/device to get e-mail, to text family, friends and colleagues, to shop online, find out the name of “that guy who was in that movie about giant frogs”, to make notes and to-do lists.

But you know that your phone can do more that even that impressive list of things. With all of the apps and programs available to us today, I should have said far, far more. Here are some of the less frequently used, but impressive things your smartphone can accomplish:

Walking and chewing gum is hard for some of us, but my smartphone can come along on a run with me and not only play good music or an interesting podcast to entertain me, but keep track of my running route, pace, calories burned and progress at the same time. A thumb press to the screen will even tell me my heart rate, so I can be sure I’m hitting my aerobic targets.

I can scan barcodes at stores to find out all kinds of information about the product I’m looking at (and check prices from lots of other places), or I can scan business cards and have the information on them dumped into my contact manager without ever typing a single word.

I can pay bills at the point of purchase with mobile wallet apps like ISIS, or specialty purchase apps like the Starbucks card. When I auto-reload my Starbucks card (“add 30 dollars whenever my balance goes below 10 dollars) I can be sure that I will never be stranded without cash AND coffee at the same time.

I can buy my airline tickets with my phone, use it to check in via mobile boarding pass, and track the progress of the flight so I can see if I am going to miss that important connection or not.

I can carry around a virtual toolbox, and use my phone as a level, a compass, a flashlight, a ruler, a mirror, or a magnifying glass. If I put a small droplet of water on the camera lens it works as a pretty good basic microscope. I can tell if my TV remote is working (infrared flashes show up in the phone camera viewfinder), and with the right apps I could even use the phone itself as a remote.

Of course I use my phone all the time to keep track of the date and the time, but I can also use it as an alarm clock, a timer, or a stopwatch.

With the purchase of the right plug in devices, I can start my car with my phone, diagnose what’s wrong when my “Check Engine” light comes on, turn appliances on and off, find drafty windows, make sure my friends haven’t had too much to drink, and even find out where the fish are hiding if I’m out on a fishing trip.

Oh, and I can make phone calls with my phone. And add, subtract, multiply and divide (and do square roots)!