Smartphone cameras let you take advantage of every available photo opportunity. With the right apps, your camera can perform different function such as translating texts to scanning paperwork. And with their increasing pixels and the ability to focus the opportunities are always increasing.
Translate text when in another country
With a typical translation app, you have to tap out text in a foreign language and then convert it to your native tongue, or vice versa. With the Google Translate app that’s not a problem: Scan the menu (or any other document) with your phone’s camera and instantly view the English translation.
You can work this trick on any phone with the free Google Translate app. Once you download the program, open it and choose the languages you’ll require—the one to be translating from and the one to be translated to—from the drop-down menus at the top of the screen.
Then tap the Instant translate button, which looks like a camera with a little plus sign inside. Now point your phone’s camera at foreign text, from road signs to paper documents, and the screen will display the translated words as if by magic.
Explore the night sky
Gazing up at the stars on a clear night is dreamy, but you can make that experience even better by identifying which dot of light is which. With the right app, your phone’s camera will act as a star guide. Point it at the sky, and visual overlays will tell you whether the object you’ve spotted is the International Space Station or the star Polaris.
Star Walk 2 Android, offers a nice design and more features than similar apps. It relies on your location and input from the phone’s internal gyroscope to pinpoint constellations, passing satellites, and other objects. You can also use it to see how the night sky changes as you move forward or backward in time, read up on the cosmos and view 3-D models of constellations.
Enjoy Augmented reality
Both Android and iOS are adding augmented reality tweaks to their respective platforms, and third-party app developers are also jumping on the scene.
Start with Snapchat Android. Install the photo and video messaging app, open the camera screen, and tap anywhere on the scene. Snapchat will immediately display a variety of AR stickers, which you can preview with a tap. Then adjust your angle, place the sticker where it fits best, and take a photo or video as normal.
Scan paper documents
Thanks to your phone’s camera, you can scan everything from bank statements to business cards and then keep them in your local storage or upload them to the cloud.
While you can always snap photos of documents and keep them in your default photo app’s gallery, a dedicated app will provide extra features like automatic cropping and even text recognition (so you can easily search through your scanned pages).
The versions of Google Drive for Android and iOS can both scan documents: Tap the Plus icon and choose Scan. However, only the Android app offers automatic optical character recognition.