Fun Fact: If you turn your IOS phone on it’s side, the Calculator becomes Scientific

If you’re one of those people who keeps your phone in “Portrait Lock,” you may want to rethink it. That is, if you want to use the secret “Scientific Calculator” that’s hiding within your current Basic Calculator app. It’s true! Simply open up your calculator, turn your phone horizontally to “Landscape” mode, and voila! You’ve got a Scientific Calculator at your disposal.

This feature unlocks all sorts of functionality, like adding numbers to memory, parentheses, exponents, and all those trig functions from back in high school. The feature isn’t exactly new, or hidden: It was introduced in iOS 2.0 back in 2008, and there’s actually even a screenshot of it on the App Store page for the calculator app.

To be fair, most people probably never see that App Store page, as the app comes pre-installed on every phone. It’s not the first app that you’d probably look for if you wanted to install a new calculator, either — even with the hidden(ish) functionality, it’s still not great. For starters, there’s no ticker tape feature, which lets you see all the operations you’ve just done, which is useful when you need to see if you’ve already added a value or not. It also makes some essential functions like parentheses hard to access.

Still, it’s a fun feature, and even if you’re not needing to do any trigonometry in the near future, you might want to check it out.

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Photo Credit: Hadrian / Shutterstock.com