What did you do with your old Smartphone

After reading this article on Lifehacker, I was left smiling.

So very much bile and grief.

Ok, so you have a smartphone.  It's older than your contract.  Get it unlocked.   You can even do that with your AT&T Phones.  Mostly, anyway.  There are some phones that are simply hardwired to be with the company you got it from.

My being the king of electronic repurposing, there area a lot of uses that you can get out of the little beasts.

You will want to remove the SIM.   That's the little chip that tells the phone to talk to the cell towers.  If you managed to get it unlocked, you still can use it for "Old Times Sake" or just give/sell/pass it on to someone else.  But that SIM is required in the new phone to make it work like a phone.

Some of the things I use my hand-me-down smartphones for are:

One of them is unlocked.   I use it when my "real" phone is dead.  Swap in my SIM and now I'm back on the air.  You can even use it when you're in a bad neighborhood so you don't lose the "good phone".

Load it up like an iPod and walk around listening to the same tracks over and over because I can't stand having iTunes on my laptop phoning home every couple hours.   At least that is easier to deal with on Android.  Fewer programs to "manage" my music preferences.

Download a copy of Magic Jack for emergencies.  You can make free phone calls in the US using your Wifi and this software.

I keep one on the nightstand for when I wake up.  Since the "regular" phone is on charge, I turn this thing on and use it to check up on Radar/Weather/News/etc. 

Internet Radio is great when you have a wifi-only no-longer phone smartphone.  I use a program called TuneIn and can listen to all those streams or radio stations from outside of the house when I'm tired and want something new.

No, this isn't earth shattering news.  But it is better than tossing it in a drawer and then in the trash in a few months.  May as well use the thing, after all you paid for it, and really you paid quite a lot for it.