Cell-phoneHave got a new mobile phone and wonder what you can do with it? Well, there are many more ways to use a mobile phone than anyone can think of. By purchasing a special accessory or installing a special application, one can extend the phone’s functionality much beyond just making calls or sending text messages. Here are some useful examples.

1. Connect an external monitor or an LCD projector to your phone to display its content on a big screen. Spectec Computer Co produces special adaptors for these purposes which are available at many online stores. By the way, some phones, for example some i-Mate models have an AV output, so they can be connected to an external monitor directly without an adaptor.

2. Connect external speakers to your phone to play music at home. That is even easier, appropriate adaptor cables are very cheap and are available at Amazon(dot)com and many other online stores. Most of them convert the phone’s specific output socket to the 3.5 mm standard, which is commonly used in many audio devices.

3. Use your Windows Mobile phone as WiFi hotspot. An application called Mobile Wi-Fi Router lets you use your phone’s Internet connection as a WiFi hotspot, so that you can connect your laptop of PC to the Internet.

4. Control your PC remotely from mobile phone. Program called LogMeIn works through any Web browser on PCs and mobile phones and allows controlling a PC remotely as if one is sitting in front of it.

5. Send and receive faxes on mobile phone. Some mobile phones are able to send and receive faxes. For those phones that do not have this feature there are fax applications. Cortado Fax is a fax application available for Windows Mobile, Symbian OS and Blackberry. There is also a similar application, called Simple Internet Fax, for Palm OS and Windows Mobile.

6. Print documents from your Windows Mobile phone. PocketWhere is a Windows Mobile application that prints any document on a mobile device. This program connects to available WiFi networks and can print documents on printers connected to those networks.

7. If you forgot your key inside the car. This trick is reported to work with many mobile phones although not with all. If you forgot your key inside the car and the door is locked but there is a spare key at home try the following. Call someone at home and ask them to press the door open button while holding the key close to the phone. You should be holding your mobile phone in about 20 cm from the door lock. The lock will open (hope you will not get into a situation where you will need this trick but you can try it just for fun).

8. Use your mobile device as a remote control. If your mobile device has an IR port, you can use it as a remote control for your TV, DVD player and other home appliances. There are many applications that enable this functionality in mobile phones, for example, NoviiRemote Deluxe for Windows Mobile and Infrared Remote Control for Symbian OS.

9. How to cook an egg using mobile phone. Put two mobile phones on both sides of an egg and a walkman or an iPod with speakers next to them. Start a phone call between the two phones and then play the music, which will imitate a conversation between them. In about one hour your egg will be cooked. This trick is published on many web sites and was verified by some newspaper journalists. Of course, I do not suggest that you use your phone in the kitchen, I just want to remind everyone that it is better to use earphones, especially if one talks a lot.

10. Make cheap international and long distance calls from mobile phone. One can make use of the ability of many modern phones to connect to the Internet. There are special applications that allow one to use his or her Skype account from mobile phones to make free calls to other Skype users and very cheap Skype Out calls to regular phones.