14 Great Things iPhones and BlackBerrys Can Do

Smartphones are intelligent, but with the 14 tips and tricks in this story, they could approach genius territory. We'll show you how to run seven separate devices from your iPhone, how to play Internet radio (mostly for free) on your BlackBerry, how to make free phone calls from an iPod Touch, and how to revive a dead cell phone battery (if it's detachable) while you're in winter weather.

For more, see the other stories in our "57 Amazing Things You Didn't Know Your Tech Could Do!" package, including our full list of tips and tricks.

Control 7 Different Devices From an iPhone

Perhaps you didn't know that your iPhone or iPod Touch can act as a Wi-Fi remote for many hardware devices. You simply connect the iPhone through Wi-Fi to the same local network, though in many cases you'll also have to install a PC utility (provided by the app developer) that listens for instructions from your iPhone over the Wi-Fi network. Here are my favorite tools to control PCs and other devices.

DVR Remote (US$3) lets the iPhone drive a Series 3 TiVo, with access to all of the buttons and features of the innovative DVR. Best of all, you can tap text in with the regular iPhone keyboard instead of pecking at the on-screen alphabet with the arrow buttons.

i-Clickr PowerPoint Remote ($10) manages presentations, even showing your talking notes or upcoming slides on the iPhone. It's a great counterpoint to the remote available for Apple's Mac-only Keynote tool in iWork.

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