Photorefractive spatial solitons have recently been the object of intense fundamental research. This paper proposes two applications of this interesting low power phenomenon. Photorefractive self-focusing can indeed be used to enhance nonlinear processes such as wavelength conversion. Furthermore, its sensitivity to low power optical beams makes it a good candidate towards all optical switching and computing, provided the time response issues have been solved. This paper proposes a switching technology with optical powers on the scale of a few mW/cm2 and provides strong hints towards solving the photorefractive time response issue.