What can Smartphones do?

Beyond the expected phone calls and the occasional stint on Angry Birds it is very unlikely that the average smart phone owner will have any idea of the amazing tricks that his or her phone can get up to. But what capabilities does a phone actually have and what ingenious ideas could we use

smartphone technology

for? Gps is currently used for much more then I could envisage: from

location based shopping

to assisting augmented reality apps. Then there's  frequency detection across the gsm network (I'm ignorant enough to say that I don't even know what frequencies this is-vhf; uhf?).Of course then there's  connectivity to the internet via 3g which amongst other things opens up a whole world of information that our ancestors never had access to.On my phone there's even proximity detection to stop the  phone turning off during calls, imagine if you could bump up the capabilities on that(imagine a WWII submarine captain using a beefed up proxy sensor on a phone to avoid floating mines!). And then there's the rest: accelerometer, can this be tuned to pick up g-forces and could this be used to help our driving skills?What about motion sports such as Golf-couldn't this accelerometer be used to determine power and angle of your swing. There's also the  led lights for the camera, at their simplest they can be used as a torch, but what other canny uses could they be put to(I believe that the

Pulse app

for Android uses this quite cleverly to pick up your heart rate). What about  the camera itself and of course the microphone and possibly many. many bits of technological wizardry that I can't even think of. Thats a lot of capabilities, perhaps pretending to fight off the piggy menace shouldn’t be the pinnacle of what our

phones are used

for.Smartphone technology has come a long way since the days of monochromatic screens all the power is there but just needs to be harnessed.

Phones of the Future-courtesy of St Martin's college of art and Design

Augmented Reality is also covered in this post.