Hidden apps on your smartphone: Talking Tech podcast

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Hey there listeners, it’s Brett Molina. Welcome back to Talking Tech. One of the coolest things about owning a smartphone is sometimes there are features or little tricks that you don’t really know about. In fact, after reading a column from my colleague, Kim Komando, that’s on tech.USAtoday.com, she discusses secret treasures, hidden apps on your smartphone and how to find them.

I read this and I found one that I didn’t know about either. It’s great. Again, it’s one of the great things about having a smartphone is there’s stuff in there that you never realize existed, and now you can use and it’s fun. So, I’m going to go through a couple for iPhone right now. Let’s start with Magnifier.

It is a super cool, pretty straightforward app, but what it does is lets you use your phone as a magnifying glass. So, if you’re ever dealing something with fine print and maybe you don’t have glasses or for whatever reason you need to magnify it, all you have to do is bring up your phone, you type in Magnifier in the search function.

What I’ve done is if I’m on the home screen, I’ll swipe down, from the middle of the screen down and you’ll pull up a search option with some recommended apps, type in Magnifier there and then you get the magnifier. Then you can just drag the slider, and you adjust the magnification to see how close, how far away you want to get, and it’s right there.

The other one, and this is the app I didn’t know existed is the Code Scanner. This is for scanning QR codes. You’ve seen those, the square black and white boxes that you’ve seen around and you hold up your camera and it points you to a website and you can go to the website. You can do this straightforward with your camera. If you ever have your camera up, you can bring it up that way, but another way to do it too is this Code Scanner. Again, as Kim points out, you search for it the same way. You swipe on the home screen, you search and you can pull it up.

If you find that you’re scanning QR codes often, you can add it to your control center as well. To get to there, you go to settings, you’ll go to control center and it’ll give you a list of the apps that are already you there, along with a list of apps at the bottom that you can add. You’ll see Code Scanner there, you can add it, you can add Magnifier there as well. That way if you ever see a QR code and you want to scan it really quick, you just go pull down control center from the top corner, hit that and then scan your QR code. It’s really easy, really simple.

The last feature that I’ll mention here, I use this a lot, because I found it to be just so much easier, controlling your printer from your phone or tablet. I do this a lot from my iPhone. As long as your printer supports AirPrint or any kind of Wi-Fi-based printing, you’re in good shape. Basically the way it works is your printer and your phone are both connected to the same Wi-Fi network. Then if say there’s a document you want to print, you want to do it from your phone, instead of having to turn on your laptop or something like that, you go right to your phone, you hit print. You’ll look for that same printer that’s on the same Wi-Fi network, you select it, hit print, done. Super easy, great feature. Again, I use it all the time, it is super, super helpful.

To learn more about some of these hidden apps and cool functions that you can use on your iPhone, as well as your Android phone, be sure to read Kim’s column on tech.USAtoday.com.

Listeners, let’s hear from you. Do you have any comments, questions, or show ideas, any tech problems you want us to try to address? You can find me on Twitter @brettmolina23. Please don’t forget to subscribe and rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, anywhere you get your podcasts. You’ve been listening to Talking Tech, we’ll be back tomorrow with another quick hit from the world of tech.