Turns out Australia is removing 3G support nationwide and that means I have to upgrade. I’ve had my phone for at least 4 years but it runs well, I wasn’t planning on upgrading for at least another year.
I want to keep using it, but I’m not too tech oriented so my thinking has been, " I can play music with it, some games, videos"…And that’s fine. But perhaps some of you guys have more creative ideas? Curious as to what would you recommend.
If you have a dongle dac, a DIY DAP?
I use a Pixel 6a I had laying around as a dedicated Discord device, paired with a bluetooth headset. Now I can chat with the lads while around the house doing chores.
Haha, brilliant. I’m still running my 5a, so that sounds kinda crazy to me.
Oops, I mean 4a, sorry.
What have you replaced it with? I still have my 4a and kind of dread the day i will have to replace it.
I went with the 7a, because the form factor isn’t too much larger and it has wireless charging. And of course, it can be flashed with GrapheneOS.
In case you own a lot of devices with remotes, you might transform it into a universal remote with an USB C IR dongle. Wouldn’t be my first choice as you’d still need to recharge it so often but I read of such projects.
Alternatively, you could give it to children for gaming and watching videos. Children are anyway mostly on WiFi and if you equip it with some emulators and ROMs they’ll have tons of funny games without all of these toxic in-app purchases, ads and casino mechanisms.
I like having offline apps on my old android phone. Such as the Kiwix app with offline wikipedia, Organic maps app with downloaded maps, Readera app with some epub books.
Eat it.
Google AI will take this seriously
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Donate it. I’m sure there’s someplace that will want it as a wifi-cabable minitablet for kids to access the Internet on.
Load it to the brim with literature pdf’s, put in a faraday box incase an nuclear EMP or those monster solar flare things takes out all electrical components. I’m not a doomsday prepper or anything but did this with an old 256gb phone for shits and giggles. It’s absolutely insane the amount of text documents 256gb holds lol
Id love to find your stash in the fallout universe
This is just 64 GB but yeah why not
get a controller frame like a GameSir and do some emulated gaming.
Set up wifi plus some free music streaming (not saying you should purate it, or use a web browser with ad block), hook it up to a loudspeaker and tada, modern jukebox!
I used a pair of them as an improvised baby monitor for a while.
When I went on vacation, I left my phone behind and took along an old smartphone with no sim card. I used the smartphone as a camera. It still received a GPS signal and I loaded off-line maps so I could use Google Maps. When I was at the hotel in the evening I checked my email and looked up local information with wifi and played games on it. But work couldn’t call me, which was nice.
So… like a mini iPad mini?
Yep!
The most common thing I’ve seen are projects where it acts like a screen or control panel on the wall. Something that’s a fixture or art project.
You don’t need it for anything like music or games - your new phone will be more convenient and run those things better anyway.
A friend of mine stuck an old tablet on the wall and connected it via Bluetooth to his keg system. It gave him a permanent status readout on his beer temperature and how much was left in each keg. It just had a power cable plugged in all the time so it didn’t need to be charged.
Oh that’s cool, I like that with the beer. Unfortunately I don’t brew… Or have any other setup that could use a dedicated screen.
I also think I’ll end up playing media more with the new one, but I keeping some of my CD rips and most watched/recurrent videos stored locally on my old phone would be useful for whenever YouTube messes up everything ( as it is doing right now ).
I wonder if this would work while having the battery removed.
The last few phones I had wouldn’t power on if they didn’t have a minimum battery charge, even when plugged in. That’s to ensure a minimal amount of available power to be able to boot the phone. I wonder if the phone would have the same restriction with a missing battery and not just a drained battery…
I assume you’re concerned about the battery eventually blowing up from being on the charger forever?
Not sure how easy this is anymore, but when I was a teen I was flashing my friends phone with cyanogenmod and it died midway through, bricked and wouldn’t charge either.
We opened it up, cut open a charging cable and manually attached them to the battery terminals with the battery removed until it turned back on and we were able to flash stock and back to cyanogenmod lmao
That’s right. I wonder if you could trick certain models with simulating a battery.
Really good idea, as long as it can stay plugged in.
Recycle.
I think OP has better idea wit reusing it first before recycling. No point in recycling a functioning phone when you may have a use for it still.
Dropping links without any context or explanation is not a good contribution. Especially if it is not clear what the background of OP is, so explaining how to run docker on Android is not something that helps most people.
