I am crossposting here from the Reject Convenience forum to get a discussion going on uses for old/broken phones.
The thing is that I have like 5 or 6 old phones that me and my family have accumulated over the years. Some work just fine, and I wiped one of them to use as a fully offline music/podcast player.
However, I still have some phones that I don’t want to just become e-waste. Especially one of them, a Galaxy Z Flip 3, whose screen broke and it was too expensive (€700) to fix.
So, here is my question: what use can I give to these devices? I have two that have an unresponsive screen, but I feel like I could give them a new life somehow.
I don’t know if, at least, there are parts that could be salvaged the same way you would an old laptop’s?
Let’s start a discussion!!
ps. i know this isn’t really privacy/security related per se, let me know if this isn’t an appropiate forum for this kind of discussion
You can harvest the parts for another non-functional model, fix it using those parts, then either continue the cycle until there are no remaining parts left or recycle the remainder.
I had thought of most of these options, actually, which mainly are turning the phone into a security camera/dashcam/similar. These honestly seem like really good options to make use of an old phone, especially one that’s perfectly functional still.
However, that is not something I personally need right now. I have looked into VDO.Ninja also, which seems like a really cool project but, once again, I do not have a use for any of the options it offers at this point.
This honestly would be kind of ideal, getting to tinker with the phones and whatnot.. But unfortunately I do not have that technical knowledge and/or skills