8 ways to repurpose your previous Android or Iphone

What was the fate of your previous smartphone? Is it in a drawer, collecting dust between free batteries and an instruction manual for a prolonged-overlooked waffle iron? Perhaps you donated it to a good friend or forgot about it altogether. Do you even know in which it is? You monster.

Accusations apart, it’s really worth considering about, since there is probable lots of life in it yet, and it could even conserve you some cash. From dash cams to baby screens, your aged Android and Apple iphone and Standalone Smartwatch equipment can be repurposed to offer years of faithful services until they lastly break, or the universe reaches a state of entropic warmth-death – whichever will come initially.

With much more and much more people starting to be more and more conscientious with their waste and environmental effects, you’d be carrying out your bit to assist help save the world way too. With all that in mind, here are a handful of issues you can do to help usher your previous handset into a brand name-new afterlife.

1. Convert it into a sprint cam

Dash cams have skyrocketed in attractiveness over the previous several yrs, and with superior reason. They offer indisputable evidence for insurance coverage claims from both equally motorists and cyclists, whilst occasionally recording outrageous functions like meteors streaking through the sky or trees getting blown above.

If you have obtained an previous cell phone with a working digital camera, then you are excellent to go. If you’re respiration new lifetime into an previous Android handset, then AutoBoy Sprint Cam is a stable alternative. It automatically deletes older recordings that you don’t require, and has a crash sensor to assure essential footage is never shed. You can also established it to back again up your films to YouTube, and it’ll even work in the background, allowing you double the cellphone up as a sat nav much too.

The Iphone app equal – Sensible Dash Cam – is similar, despite the fact that it does not support history recording, so you can’t use any other apps when driving.

Bear in head that you’ll also will need to acquire a smartphone mount that attaches to your windshield, and have some way to cost the mobile phone in your automobile to prevent the battery from conking out on prolonged journeys. If you don’t have a USB port in your trip, or only have a person, then there are a great deal of economical in-car or truck USB adapters offered on Amazon.

2. Preserve an eye on your minimal just one(s)

Infants provide a myriad of new worries, and new dad and mom will be specially keen to do all they can to ensure their genetic copies are as safe as can be. Sure, you could purchase an high priced newborn monitor, but why do that when you’ve obtained a spare pocketable laptop with a built-in digicam and microphone?

Cloud Little one Biggest SmartWatch (accessible on iOS and Android) is a detailed app which beams your little tyke’s loud night breathing deal with to any other device you fancy.

It’s rammed with attributes, like privacy encryption, a summary of sleeping styles, quick seem and motion alerts, two-way interaction, an adjustable light-weight for visibility, constructed-in lullaby appears, and far more. Unfortunately, it won’t routinely feed hungry mouths, but who knows what a upcoming update could convey.

3. Safeguard your property

In a similar vein, you can also use old phones to establish up a total residence security technique, with bonus points for placing them within stuffed animals and hollowed out textbooks.

An application like Alfred Home Safety Digital camera – readily available on iOS and Android – harnesses the camera and microphone powers of your handset, offering sights of your house, total with computerized alerts if any intrusions are detected.

The application has features comparable to a infant keep an eye on, minus the lullabies of training course, allowing for you to scare off possible intruders or inquisitive squirrels with two-way interaction and/or a remote alarm.

You can incorporate friends and spouse and children to your circle of believe in as well, however you’ll want to keep in mind that actuality up coming time you’re going for walks close to sans towel.

4. Take a look at the deep

Certain, you could shell out hundreds on a extravagant motion camera, but for relaxed pool and snorkeling snaps, there’s a significantly more cost-effective option – a water resistant cell phone bag.

You can pick up the YOSH IPX8 for significantly less than a tenner on Amazon, and it will fit most gadgets up to 6.8 inches in sizing, totally safeguarding them from a possible watery grave. It’s well worth the funds for the peace of intellect on your own, even if your spare handset is water-proof, and primarily as salt drinking water has a nasty routine of being alternatively corrosive.

You won’t be able to work the touchscreen controls when you are entirely submerged, but pretty much every product allows you to work the shutter button by urgent the quantity controls, which is an ideal workaround.

5. Get a desktop butler

If you are soon after a tabletop good assistant you could fork out for a smart assistant-driven display screen like the Amazon Echo Show 5 – or you could just use your outdated phone. Seize a dock, depart it plugged in, and increase – you’ve bought a full-time assistant on your hands.

From Siri and Alexa, to Google Assistant and even Cortana, you’ll have temperature, news, radio displays, calendar entries, new music and additional, all just a voice command absent. For finest final results we’d propose connecting to a speaker so that you can clearly listen to almost everything over the clacking of keyboards, or scorching of bacon, relying on your area.

More mature phones are very likely to have the considerably-skipped headphone jack which will make points less complicated, but if you’ve got Bluetooth speakers then you’re all good to go.

6. Obtain aliens (Android only)

BOINC, despite its name, is really a relatively significant Android-only application which can harness the number-crunching electric power of your spare cellular phone to aid lead to distinct analysis initiatives.

These can contain the hunt for extraterrestrial life, as properly as health-related and weather study, to title a couple of alternative examples. Your phone will use up some electrical power whilst charging (to maintain the app powered) of class, but that’s a compact cost to shell out to enable ensure the survival of the human race, never you believe?

7. Come to be a shortcut king (Android only)

If you’re a hardcore streamer, media connoisseur, new music fiend, or just adore to multitask as competently as achievable, then Deckboard is the app for you.

Built to create macros for your Windows Computer system, the possibilities are near infinite, enabling you to make customizable buttons that can do something from launching applications to opening folders, viewing chats and a great deal, a great deal much more.

Obtaining a long term display with all of your most-employed applications and features at your fingertips is a veritable godsend for eager time-savers. It is a disgrace that iOS’s walled garden strategy strikes once again though – this is another Android-only affair.

8. Just get rid of it

No, we really do not suggest chuck it in the bin – we’re speaking about marketing and/or recycling. If your spare phone’s only a calendar year or two aged, it’s properly well worth the effort of observing what the likely charge is on internet sites like eBay and cellular phone recycling web pages (a lot more on that in a 2nd).

Apple enthusiasts will be pleased to hear that iPhones keep their worth extra than any other handset – two times as much as Samsung telephones, in simple fact. It’s terrible information for everybody else while – exterior of these two brand names, resale price can be really grim.

Nonetheless, it never ever hurts to search, and you can still count on to get a good amount of money of hard cash for very last year’s flagship. Use a web-site like Assess My Cell to see what your phone’s really worth throughout a multitude of different web-sites, and choose whichever delivers the ideal rate.

Some of them present a a little bit greater quantity in the kind of vouchers, which you may possibly like, and you are going to rest much better in the expertise that – in quite a few cases – your aged handset will be recycled.

If you’d relatively your cellphone carried on your legacy in working order, then giving it to somebody in require is another option. If there’s no a person that springs to brain, then charities like Oxfam will be more than grateful to receive any spare gizmos you have bought lying all over.