One great thing about IR blasters-they’re pretty cheap to throw into hardware. The hardware community has taken to calling pretty much any controllable IR emitter an “IR blaster” because, well, “IR blaster” sounds a lot cooler than “controllable IR emitter.” The use of the IR standard is why you can pair your television with a universal remote so easily, and it’s why your remote has to be pointed at the television to send signals (and usually won’t work through walls). Most TV remotes on modern TVs use infrared (IR) light to send commands from the remote to the television itself. But that doesn’t mean you don’t use one everyday-in fact, you almost certainly own at least one. If you don’t know what an IR blaster is, you’re probably not alone.
One of the less-common but still cool features you can find on some phones is known as an IR blaster. That’s still true today – if you don’t like one phone, you can choose another, complete with its own set of features and hardware tools. The wide open nature of the underlying Unix roots and the ability of manufacturers to create infinite combinations of solid (but wildly varying) hardware and software configurations meant that phones could have really wide (and sometimes wild) feature sets.
It’s not always easy to remember in the days of Android smartphones totally dominating the marketplace and everyone (and their grandma) having a consumer-grade Android phone from a giant carrier, but there was a time when Android phones were kind of hacker-ish.