By far my most favorite use is as a notepad that I always have with me. I use a custom keyboard to make typing faster and more accurate.
Anything y’all like to do with your phones that you feel like most people miss out on?
Calling other phones.
Only scammer use that function.
Weirdly enough, that’s a uniquely US problem.
Never!
tf lol that’s like suggesting eating pizza with just your hand, instead of chopsticks like a proper civilized human
Deviant
I got a waterproof case, so I use mine as a coaster.
Haven’t needed it in a while, but a wifi analyzer to identify which band(s) are least crowded
Same here. Now my router/AP does it automatically.
I use a Galaxy Ultra. currently an S22u previously a Note 9.
I use the stylus everyday. I tired a phone.sans atykus (Pixel Pro) for a month and got rid of it. The sylus is so handy
I have gone ----> Note 8, Note 9, S22u.
I draw work sketches all the time eg just this morning my parter sent me a photo of her mother’s toilet and asked me how to fix it. I typed a long set of instructions, she said huh… And can you draw me a sketch, stylus out and I did and she said now she understands and fixed it herself.
Someone givea me some info, stylus out, tap the screen and start writing eg phone number, address etc. No unlocking necessary. I have used the stylus as a camera remote on the phone but not often.
The styus makes the phone so useful it still beguiles me how peoplendo without. I use a phone and desktop.
This is definitely a huge one in my experience as well. Speech isn’t great at communicating visual detail. It’s amazing how the moment you start drawing you can just see it click in the other person’s mind.
I’ve never had a phone with a stylus before, but you make a good case for it!
I loved having a Note 2 ages ago. But since then, the styluses that are paired with phones seem so awfully plastic and cheap. I use a pretty standard phone nowadays, but I’m keeping my eyes open for a phone with a good high quality stylus that has its resting place in a niche in the phone itself. Any suggestions?
I previously had an LG Stylo and now I have a Motorola G stylus. I love both of them. The stylus is kind of thin but it’s stored in the phone. I use the notepad pretty frequently so having a phone with a stylus is a must have for me.
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
Syncthing
An excuse not to interact with people.
“Sorry, my notifications were off while I was busy yesterday and didn’t have a chance to check it”.You can use most modern phones as a spirit level with the right app! It’s really useful when doing projects around the house, not having to run around to find a real one. Quite accurate, too!
What custom keyboard do you use, and which layout?
I use Typewise, with its default hexagonal layout that’s supposedly based on the frequency of letters in English. I’ve gotten alright with it - ~60 WPM on Monkeytype, which is enough that it doesn’t feel clunky to use it. And it’s quite fun to practice, too!
While I’m pretty sure it’s quite possible to write faster with more predictive keyboards, I really appreciate the precision this one allows. Especially since I’m bilingual, which leads to autocorrect and swype getting quite confused sometimes.
I’m still in the market for a better keyboard app. Another interesting one I’ve tried was MessagEase. It looks really cool and arcane to use, but I found it to be slower in spite of me putting more effort into mastering it.
Oh dang, that’s $32 AUD! Bit out of my price range!
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.
SSH
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.
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.
Installing postmarketOS on it to turn it into a full fledged pocket PC. It now runs all your favorite Linux-compatible desktop applications except for those that don’t have ARM64 versions, and even then emulation layers can fix this. It’s not 100% as I haven’t been able to get Steam working (it starts but errors out before the login screen) though I have seen some people have success on other distros so maybe it’s a pmOS/Alpine/musl specific issue even though I was using distrobox with Debian to actually run it.
Is there a single phone made in the last ten years that will run postmarketOS at all?
The best one right now is the OnePlus 6/6T, which has a relatively modern SoC.
My favorite use for my phone was wabbitemu, which was a perfect emulator for the ti86 calculator I’ve used almost daily since 1998. Apparently my new phone uses a new architecture and the app doesn’t work, so that’s rather disappointing.