In the 21st Century, people are constantly looking for ways to make their life and work essentially easier. We look for hacks for just about everything – from cooking better to coping with everyday life. Essentially, hacks are the tricks or tips that help us do things efficiently and in lesser time.

With smartphones and similar devices becoming an indispensable addition to our daily lives, it is only natural we have some cool hacks for them as well. In my search for the best gadget hacks, we came across many, but only the best made onto this list. These hacks can not only help you save time but can also simplify or amplify your user-experience.

Hack 1: Measure using your smartphone
Turns out, in the 21st century, you don’t need a tape to measure length, height or width. Your smartphone is sophisticated enough to do that. You just need an app to do so. You can measure just about anything – from the height of your cup to the width of a park. There are plenty of cool tools in the Play Store as well as in the App Store lining up (pun intended) to be put to use.

Hack 2: Take Selfies Using Headphones
Yep, read that right. Not only with the volume button of their phones, iPhone users, and many Android ones, can click a picture by simply hitting the volume button on their headphones.
Bet you didn’t know that.

Hack 3: Turn your Phone into a master remote
Until a decade ago, or before Apple launched a selfie-camera iPhone, the title of ‘most-used device in the history of mankind’ would have probably gone to remote controllers. From TVs to ACs to cars, everything of utility came with a small wand that had rubber buttons on it.
Phones now come with IR blasters that can be paired with IR-controlled devices. This means you don’t need to search between the sofa seats to shut your TV down. Your phone’s enough.
Not only that, you can use your smartphone to check whether an infrared-based remote is working or not. Infrared rays cannot be seen by the naked eye, but they sure are visible from your camera. Infrared rays show up as white or purple light in the camera’s viewfinder.

Hack 4: Get a Recycle Bin for Android
Windows has Recycle Bin, Mac has Trash, what does Android have?
Even the iPhone has a feature that stores deleted pictures and videos for 30 days before deleting them permanently. Files deleted in a hurry or without contemplating the consequences can be restored easily with such a feature.
However, Android developers, as usual, never disappoint.
There are some apps in Google Play that offer such protection to user files.

Hack 5: Don’t know something? Upload a picture and get it identified
Long gone is the time when you had to type in the search bar to get the answers. With image recognition software, identifying specific objects in a picture has become a reality.
Google Goggles, the search engine giant’s very own photo recognition tool, does all that it advertises. Whether you are forgetting or coming across the name of something for the very first time, goggles can ID it in a jiffy. It runs the query against its massive image database to come up with near matches and provides reliable results most of the time.
There you have it… These were the top smartphone hacks that can simplify your daily life. Now that you know that your phone is an awesome device capable of doing amazing stuff, don’t forget to give these hacks a try.


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