Use The Camera on Your Phone Creatively
April 23rd, 2008 | by Rob |WHY? There are more uses for your camera phone than just taking photos for fun.
You may have a camera on your cell phone. Do you use it? Here are some creative ideas for using the camera on your cell phone:
- Take a photo of friends and contacts (or logos) and associate them with the appropriate contact in your address book
- Take a photo of a product in a store you want to research online later
- Take a photo of a product in your home you want to buy at the store
- Take a photo of your parking lot name (like at a mall or theme park)
- Take photos of card numbers when you don’t need the card itself (like frequent flier miles cards)
- Take a photo of your license plate (I can never remember my plate number)
- Take a photo and publish it to a photo-sharing website like Flickr.com
Can you think of other creative uses for your camera phone?
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5 Comments to “Use The Camera on Your Phone Creatively”
By Canadian Tech Guy on Apr 23, 2008 | Reply
Here is a really useful way to use your camera phone:
Class Notes is a Facebook app that takes advantage of the cool features of scanR. scanR turns your phone into a scanner, copier, or fax. It allows you to take a picture of documents using your cell phone camera and sends it you as a PDF. Using the Class Notes Facebook app, you can take pictures of any document and have it uploaded to Facebook ready to share instantly. A great tool for the traveling business professional who has a camera phone, or a student who missed class.
By Rob on Apr 23, 2008 | Reply
By Erik on Apr 23, 2008 | Reply
Rob, those are some good tips. I also frequently use my phone camera to take pictures of white board notes after a meeting if I don’t have time to type them in. This also works well for written notes that I might suddenly need to take with me (like directions someone wrote out).
I have also used it in hotels and during travel to take pictures of informational signs that might have key info about bus or shuttle times or phone numbers I will want to know later.
Speaking of “taking notes,” i have seen more and more people use their phone (or regular digital camera) to take pictures of PPT slides in presentations as a way of “taking notes” instead of trying to copy all the words down by hand.
One last thing. I have an HTC TyTN II phone (same as AT&T tilt), which I bought where I live in Singapore. The phone came with WorldCard Mobile software that allows you to take a picture of a business card and it scans it in (similar to OCR software) and puts the info in a new contact on your phone -very slick. Search on WorldCard mobile online if you want to learn more.
By Rob on Apr 24, 2008 | Reply
By Jill on Apr 26, 2008 | Reply
I love the idea of taking pics of products in stores. Just about with anything, I will see something in a store and come home to see if I can find it cheaper on-line. Most of the time I do! So this will be very helpful, because a lot of times I don’t have a pen or paper with me.
Thanks for the tip.