But buried deep in the settings menus and manuals of your appliances are features that engineers built to make your life easier, if only you knew they existed.
Here are four genuinely useful features hiding in the devices you use every day.
The Device: Any Smartphone Camera (Android or iPhone) The Use Case: Checking if your TV remote is broken or just out of batteries.
Have you ever smacked a TV remote against your palm because it stopped working? Next time, use science. The human eye cannot see Infrared (IR) light, the signal remotes use to talk to TVs, but your smartphone camera can.
How to do it:
- Point the remote control’s bulb directly at the camera lens.
- Press any button on the remote.
- Look at your phone screen. If the remote is working, you will see a faint purple or white light flashing from the bulb.
Pro Tip: If you have a newer iPhone, the rear cameras have filters that block IR light. Use the front-facing (selfie) camera instead, it usually lacks this filter and works perfectly.
The Device: Most Smart TVs (Samsung, LG, Sony, etc.) and Streaming Sticks (Fire Stick, Roku). The Use Case: Watching movies at full volume at 2 AM without waking the baby/spouse/neighbors.
You don’t need to watch action movies with the volume set to "1" and subtitles on just because it’s late. Almost every modern Smart TV has a Bluetooth Transmitter built-in, similar to your phone.
