This ridiculous camera phone hack may change your life

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For social media aficionados, screen orientation across platforms is an irritating issue. While TikTok only displays vertically, YouTube videos are best viewed on full-screen mode, which is horizontal. If you're a content creator, this means either filming duplicate videos or cropping the existing video to fit both screen orientations.

But a social media/tech genius has come up with a solution that's bound to catch on, if you can handle the dubious glances that might be directed at you. And all that's needed is the humble rubber band and not one but two of the best camera phones. (Although some awesome photo apps for editing wouldn't hurt).

A Vox reporter Rebecca Jennings tweeted the above gem, sharing the ridiculous hack this unidentified TikToker came up with to solve the problem. Again, you will need two phones – one for filming for YouTube and the other for TikTok (see our guide to the TikTok app for the uninitiated), but the double outlay seems like a small price to pay. You need to cross them over each other, one sitting vertically and the other horizontally so that the horizontal phone can film horizontally and the vertical one can film, well... vertically. Then hold them in place with a rubber band and voila! 

We admire this Blue Peter-style initiative and wonder if it will provoke any tech manufacturers into tweaking the smartphone camera somehow to create a similar effect. After all, the Samsung has already tackled the screen rotation issue head on with its invention of a TV that literally spins on its axis to rotate from horizontal to vertical, so its clearly an issue that's on at least one tech giant's radar. Responses on Twitter confirm this.

One user claims to have solved the problem already, with his tongue-in-cheek pitch to Apple.

All innovation has to start somewhere, right? And heavy social media users are often the ones to invent hacks that fill in the gaps in the tech (as with this nifty Instagram feed hack) until the technology is tweaked.

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