It used to be that cellular phones were used for making and receiving calls and occasionally receiving text messages. That, of course, was your father’s cell phone. New apps and functionality have turned smartphone devices into hotel room keys, telemedicine devices and metal detectors.
Checking In
InterContinental Hotels Group is planning to start testing technology at two Holiday Inns that will let guests use their smartphones to unlock their hotel-room door, USA Today’s Hotel Check-In blog reports. Here is how it would work: guests would download the app from a website that IHG is developing. They receive a confirmation email on the device, which they hold up to a sensor on the door of their room to unlock it.
An app for the Android can find coins - or any other kind of metal - by morping the device into a metal detector, writes PC World. Called East Metal Detector Lite, the app uses the phone’s magnetometer, which is normally used for compass functions. Besides having a better interface than comparable application, the app also has a friendly beeping sound to let the user know he or she has found something.
Other apps focus on users themselves.
PocketHeat, an app that keeps your hands warm, works by making the iPhone max out 100% of its power processing capacity, according to TUAW. A slider adjusts the temperature and illuminates the "heating elements."
The iBreath, while not an app but rather an accessory for the iPod that transmits music from a car radio, can be used as a portable breathalyzer test, writes MacNewsWorld. A driver blows into the attached tube to get a measurement of blood alcohol content (BAC) that measures accurately to within 0.01 percent BAC with a maximum limit of 0.12.
Software being developed by American and Australian scientists is expected to allow patients to cough into their phone. The app will then tell the user where he or she has the cold, flu, pneumonia or other respiratory diseases, the Telegraph says. The software would compare the patient’s cough to a pre-recorded database of coughs: these include coughs of people with all respiratory diseases, in both genders, and various ages, weights and other variables.
