In all the excitement of getting a new phone, we tend to forget all about our old one. We might consider selling them to a company that specializes in reclaiming old phones, but we don't tend to receive a lot of money for them. In a lot of cases, it's barely even worth making an effort to package them up and post them. Instead of doing that, we leave them in our drawers, forgotten and gathering dust. Alternatively, perhaps you threw your last phone in the trash, contributing to an e-waste problem that is causing large-scale damage to our planet.
Things don’t have to be like this. There are other things you could be doing with your phone that don’t involve leaving it in the dark or adding to the enormous piles of discarded technology that have accumulated all over the world. Even if your new phone is better looking and more powerful than its predecessor, there are still things that your old phone could be doing - things like the five suggestions we’re about to make!
Use It As A Gaming Platform
Mobile gaming is a very big business now. Five or ten years ago, the only games you could play and enjoy on your phone were either Tetris or the casino games you'd find at an online slots website, but that isn't the case today. Technology has moved on quickly - playtech casino you might have played are a lot more advanced than they used to be! Your phone's performance will drop off as it ages, but if you strip all the unnecessary apps and data off your old phone, you should find that it begins to run faster. Take your SIM card out of it, and use it just for playing games without the fear that someone's about to call you and interrupt your session! Whether it's the latest season of "Fortnite" or those same old online slots you used to play, you should find that everything runs smoothly.
Hand It Off To Someone
Not everybody can afford a brand new mobile phone every two years. If you can, you're very fortunate. Let your good fortune be the good fortune of others, too. Your old phone might make a perfect 'first phone' for your children if you have any. Perhaps you have friends or relatives who've been carrying the same phone around for years and would consider your unwanted device an upgrade on what they have already. It doesn't hurt to ask, and you might find that whoever you choose to give it to is very grateful for it. They might even get two or three more years of use out of it! Just remember to take all of your personal files off it first and log out of all of your accounts. In fact, formatting it might be a good idea. You can never be too careful!
Use It As A Webcam
Phones come with great cameras, and camera technology hasn’t improved much for the past five years. It’s possible that your new phone has a better camera than your own phone, but it’s unlikely that there’s a significant difference. That means the camera on your old phone could still be useful even if the rest of it has started to drop off in terms of performance. Hands up if you knew that you could turn your mobile phone into a webcam? We’ve all been making more Zoom and Skype calls this year than we have at any previous point in our lives, and most of us are using low-quality laptop webcams to do it. There’s no need to put up with such a grainy image if you could be using a phone to transmit video instead - so why not do it?
Turn It Into An All-Purpose Remote
A smartphone doesn’t have to be a smartphone. Modern smartphones are versatile media devices, and they can be adapted for almost any purpose. One of the most useful of those purposes is as a multi-purpose remote control. Every major TV streaming device you can think of, from Roku to Amazon and Google, comes with an app that has a remote control feature. Why have multiple remotes in your home when you could just use one device to interact with everything? If you have a smart television, you should even find that you can use your phone to operate that! Using your phone as a remote also makes it easier to enter text when searching for content, as you can use the keyboard rather than the long-winded on-screen letter-by-letter method.
Use It As An External Hard Drive
If your old phone was made five years ago or less, it's probably got at least 32GB of storage space. If it wasn't a budget model, it's more likely to have 64GB, or perhaps even 128GB. That's a lot of space for important documents, photographs, videos, or just about anything else you might want to store on it. We're all frequently told that we should take more precautions when it comes to data security. That doesn't just mean backing things up to the cloud; it also means backing them up to an external device that isn't connected to the internet or permanently connected to your main computer. Your old phone would be ideal for this purpose. Pull it out of the drawer once a week or once a month, download all of your essential data onto it, and then put it away again until next time. You might be very glad of it one day!
As we hope you can now see, your old phone is still an asset to you even if you never make another call or send another message from it. If you have one locked away in your drawer right now, pull it out and put it back to work for you!