I am a travel writer, and my iPhone’s calculator is my favorite easy and free way to convert currency and measurements
We can all agree that traveling is exciting and educational, but it’s also true that it can sometimes be confusing. We visit another country and suddenly everything from how you buy things to measuring units change, and we have to figure out the conversion. And sometimes, we can’t even begin to figure out how to do all that.
There are lots of apps you can download to do this, of course. But the reality is that you don’t have to. Everything you need is already in your phone in your calculator app. It’s free, easy to use, incredibly quick to apply.
Even easier? It’s already there, ready and waiting for you to use on your next trip.
It couldn’t be easier to use either. Start by opening the calculator app in your iPhone and toggling down to the lower left, where there’s another icon of a calculator and click on that.
You’ll get a range of hundreds of currencies and measurement units you can convert to and from, which can help you for money, but also temperature, fuel, data, volume, and weight.
By the way, this will work on your computer as well – on any Mac OS, just click the calculator button and choose “convert,” then “view” in the menu, and then “convert” again.
Converting currency using Apple’s iPhone app
(Screenshot of Aly Walansky’s iPhone)
Once you are using this feature, you have so many possibilities. At a restaurant in Europe and need to convert your money to understand what that dinner will cost? You can convert U.S. dollars (USD) to euros (EUR), right there and then, for free, without downloading or installing a single new app into your phone.
Even better, you can click on that list icon on the upper left of your iPhone’s calculator screen at any time you are in this mode to also see your history. So if you want to see what this conversion was last time you did something like that, you can do so in seconds.
