Hidden Potential

When I browse news stories on my phone, I routinely come across articles on the hidden features of the smartphone. A google search for hidden features on the iPhone 12 brought up 48 million results. A search for 'Samsung Galaxy hidden features' brought up a whopping 780 million! 'Features You Didn't Know', 'Hidden Tricks You Must Try' scream the headlines and many with specific number of such features - '21 Tips', '10 Pro Tips', etc. 

I am sure some of you remember the tagline for old yellow pages 'Let your fingers do the walking'. Our fingers are indeed doing a lot of walking these days. And talking when you include texting (Don't call - let your fingers do the talking!). In fact, they are dancing madly on the screens of smartphones, although speaking for myself, I would say not very well. More on that later but it made me wonder what we are getting from this mad dance. After all we spend a lot of time on the phone. Still there are all these articles telling us about hidden capabilities. 

With such a large number of articles crowding the internet, I am not sure what is hidden any more but then I realize that I rarely read them and hence they remain hidden from me anyway. Maybe you are one of those who read these and go, 'Yes, I knew that' or 'I have tried that one', but not me. In fact, when I first got a smartphone, it was a mystery box to me. I am not an early adopter and I got my first smartphone many years after such phones had been on the market. It was a steep learning curve to become comfortable with just the basic workings of the phone. As for things like 'Back tap', 'pinch', 'swipe left', etc. - the so called gestures, I am still behind the curve. My fingers are clearly not adept at dancing on the screen of the phone. Lifelong learning has taken a new meaning for me.

The whole thing reminds me of my first encounter with the PC some decades ago. When I booted up the machine, it whirred through several lines of display and finally ended with nothing but an intriguing and somewhat intimidating  'C:\>' on the screen. I had no clue what to do with it at that point and wondered what the hype was all about. Without all the bells and whistles of the graphical interface, it was quite underwhelming.

To get back to the phones, occasionally, I click on one of the links about secret features and actually learn something useful. For instance, I discovered that you can make it appear as though you are looking at the camera  (make eye contact as it were) when talking to someone on Facetime. I am sure you can relate to that especially after all the zoom sessions you have sat through during the last couple of years. It is annoying to see that the person you are talking to does not appear to be paying attention  because he/she is looking at your face on the screen and not at the camera. 

Why do we have all these 'hidden' features anyway? Did the coders put them in quietly behind the scenes even though they were not in the design? I rather suspect that there is simply no time to create the document or manual for the phone and keep it up to date, what with new releases happening very frequently. Still, it must frustrate the programmers that their work may remain hidden. I am sure that some of them are authoring the articles on the functions in their spare time hoping to spread the word but the gargantuan number of articles tells me that there is an army of nerds which delights in bringing the hidden potential of the smartphone to light.

Given the long list of features touted by this army, it stands to reason that many of us are probably not using the phones to their full potential. We spend a good deal of money to acquire a phone but if we are not making full use of it, are we not losing out? I would say no. It is like the sewer pipes in the house. They are only used when we use the bathroom. You don't keep flushing the toilet because the drain pipes are sitting idle. Similarly, the phones should be used only when necessary. Yes, I just compared smartphones to sewer pipes. I have probably committed technological blasphemy but you get the point. 

Talking of hidden potential, I have often heard it said that we use only a small percent of our brains. Upon enquiry, I found that this claim has been debunked thoroughly. In fact, all parts of the brain are active virtually all the time. This however, does not mean there is no scope to learn new things but it does blow up the notion that there is somehow this huge untapped capacity in our heads which, when tapped, can turn us into super-intelligent beings. Alas, no such luck. So we must still struggle to find the capacity to learn the hidden features of the smartphones. Or must we really? Like I said, it is okay to leave drains underutilized.

PS: While I was writing this, as if on cue, a relic was delivered to my mailbox, a hardcopy of the old fashioned Real Yellow Pages (not to be confused with the off-white Yellow Pages wannabes, I suppose). The book calls itself the Original Search Engine, and bears the logo suggestive of fingers walking the pages of the book. I found it rather comical. The next generation of phones must let our eyes do the walking to eliminate any comparison to the antiquated albeit original search engine.