This post is not about teaching a phone to eat all your waste :)
What to do of "old" phones
As time goes by, one (developper) gets more and more smartphones and specs
evolve, leaving older phones behind in terms of daily use.
Thus the question that arises is what to do of "old" phone ?
Of course, the quick and easy answers are :
- let it rest in a drawer for ... hum ... future use.
- give/sell it to someone
What else ... ???
HACKING !
There is a computer in the phone ! Remember ?
Depending on the phone model and the work done for it by the wonderful
community, you can :
- install another system, like Ubuntu on a Nexus One
- install uncommon services
- use as a remote home-monitoring system (camera to take pics periodically
and upload to web if delta)
- Experiment (roms, ...) : nice way to learn
To give an example to that second point, it would be to install a web server
with a few pages, tie it to a dynamic dns (you'll need to configure your
box/modem of course)
There is web servers for Android, you are not forced to install Ubuntu + Apache
:) or even to cook your own.
It all depends all your available time
That is how innovation happens.
Maybe one day, we'll see Tomcat running on a mobile phone without slowing it to
death.