Saturday 14 March 2015

Life In The Old Droid Yet

Life In The Old Droid Yet

We look at how to put an old Android phone to use, rather than trashing it or selling it

Just got a new phone? Well, then you're probably aware that in 24 months, you'll be popping out or heading online to find another new one. Yes, you might be excited about having the latest technology in your pocket right now, but after two years, your amazing new gadget will inevitably look a bit rubbish.

So what do you do with your old phone when the time comes to upgrade? Do you just sling it in the nearest bin, while trying to silence the nagging voice in your head, scolding you for doing something so environmentally unfriendly? Probably not, unless it's damaged beyond repair (the phone, not your head).

You could sell it, of course, and you'd no doubt find plenty of takers on eBay, assuming it's a decent handset and in good condition. Or you could try to trade it in, to get some money off whatever new deal you end up signing. If you're feeling more generous, you could even just give it away, whether that's to a family member or friend, or just some stranger from Freecycle.


These are all good options, but there's also another choice you could make that you might not have even considered: you can keep it. And no, we don't just mean throwing it into a drawer somewhere and forgetting about it (along with those parallel cables and floppy disks you're holding on to, because they might come in handy one day). What we mean is actually making use of it, so it genuinely enhances your life rather than just being another piece of clutter.
And even if you don't already have a drawer overflowing with old smartphones, then one of the ideas here might make it persuade you to out and buy a few.

Media Centre


If you're lucky enough to have an old phone that comes with some kind of TV output, then you have all the makings of a highly portable media centre. For example, if your smartphone supports MHL (media high-definition link), then you can use an adapter that goes into the USB charging port at one end and provides an HDMI port at the other. This gives you the option of hooking up to an HD TV or even a projector. Find yourself a handheld pico projector, and you can easily carry your own home theatre with you wherever you go. Without the speakers of a television, you'll need something to provide a volume boost, but that problem is easily solved with a speaker connected via Bluetooth or physically using a 3.5mm jack.

As for content, you can, of course, play video or music files located on your phone's memory or SD card, although you'll likely need to install a third-party media player, because many video file types won't play on most phones' built-in players. There's no shortage of options here, both free and paid for, but MoboPlayer and mVideoPlayer are among some of the best.

You also have the choice of streaming. Services such as Netflix, Spotify and the BBC iPlayer can all offer a large selection of entertainment, assuming you have an internet connection.

If you'd prefer to stream content from your home network, which might be stored on a PC or a NAS drive, then that's also possible. For that, the app BubblellPnP will be perfect. As well as being able to stream content from your phone to other devices and computers on your network, it also enables you to access their stuff too.

Remote Control


If you already have a media PC, then you don't need to hook up your old phone to watch films on your TV. But that doesn't mean spare mobile devices can't form a part of your home theatre setup anyway. With the right software, you could easily use an old handset as a remote control for your media system.

Although some phones do have infrared transmitters (including the Samsung Galaxy S5), this is relatively rare. Anyway, it's great for remote controlling TVs, DVD players and other dedicated technology like that, but it's not so useful for media PCs. Even if yours does have an infrared receiver, the sort of commands you can send are fairly limited, compared to what you can do if you use wi-fi or Bluetooth remote control apps.

There are loads of these available for Android, but one that we're rather keen on is Unified Remote. It supports connections over Bluetooth and wi-fi, and it comes with tons of preconfigured remote controls for popular apps such as Windows Media Player, VLC and Spotify, but you can also use the app to create your own custom remotes. It also offers you the ability to use your phone’s touchscreen as a trackpad and to input text on your PC with the mobile’s keyboard. You need to have the server app installed on your PC, but it’s pretty non-intrusive and just adds a small icon to your notification tray.

Another way to remote control programs is using the mobile versions of said software. For example, if you’re watching something on Netflix on your PlayStation 3, when you open the app on your phone, you’ll see a streaming symbol in the top right. Tap this and you get prompted to decide where you’d like to play videos from. If you choose the PS3, then whatever you open on the Android device will play on the console, rather than on the phone itself, and you can use the handset to control playback. This makes browsing far more intuitive, and it’s also a feature that you’ll find in Spotify and YouTube, among others. If you’re a Virgin Media customer, check out the TV Anywhere app, which enables you to do all this, as well as being able to access the TV guide and set up recordings (if you have a Tivo box).

The great thing about using an old phone instead of your current one as a remote is that you don’t have to worry about messages or calls getting in the way of you using it for this purpose. Normally, you might find that a message comes through, and to read it you have to switch away from the remote control, then switch back to use it again. If your old phone doesn’t have a SIM card, that’s not going to happen.

Remote Access


Taking the idea of remote control to the next level, remote access software grants you the ability to see your computer’s screen from any location with an internet connection or another device in your own home network. We can personally attest to the usefulness of this technology, having averted a minor publishing catastrophe by remotely accessing an iMac using an HTC Desire (yes, it was quite a few years ago) and a somewhat ropey 3G connection.

At that time, we used LogMeIn, which was one of only a few remote access apps for Android, but these days you have far more choice, and the features they offer have grown in number too. For example, you could try a Splashtop product. There’s a huge range of its apps available, and the free one will allow you to stream over a local network from a PC or Mac to an Android device, which could be useful for a media centre or for moving files around from a different part of your house. It also offers access over the internet, but this requires you to pay a fee for the Anywhere Access pack ($1.99 monthly or $16.99 a year). There are also various paid-for versions, which don’t require a subscription, so it’s worth researching them all before settling on one.

Also, bear in mind that there are quite a few free apps that do the same thing, such as TeamViewer and Microsoft Remote Desktop. We haven’t tried them all, so we can’t say how good they all are, but what we can say is that we’ve been able to quite satisfactorily locally stream a PC game with full audio to an Android tablet using Splashtop, so perhaps you get what you pay for. (On a side note, take a look at the app Kainy for dedicated PC game streaming, because it features a number of gaming-related tweaks and optimisations.)

Nevertheless, we’d recommend trying the many free options first, before laying down any cash. Of course, if you buy an app you don’t like from the Play store, you always have the 15-minute window to decide you don’t like it and get a refund.

Mini Games Console


Whether you’re hooking your old smartphone up to an external display or just using its built-in screen, it can function as a pretty decent gaming machine. Of course, it very much depends on the spec of the phone, but any flagship handset from the past five years should be more than enough for this purpose.

Obviously, there are tons of games you can play on in the Play store, but there are also loads of emulators for retro systems. It’s no surprise that consoles like the Super Nintendo and Genesis are easily emulated by most Android devices, but you might not realise you can even run PlayStation One games, as well as titles for DOS, N64, PSP, and Amiga, among others. Of course, you also step into pretty murky waters, legally speaking, when you’re using game ROMs, so you shouldn’t download any games you don’t already own, and we won’t go into where you can acquire ROMs. What we will say is that there are plenty of excellent emulators, but also more than a few not so good ones, so make sure you look at the reviews before handing any money over.

Regardless of whether you’re playing emulated or native games, you can greatly enhance your experience using a gamepad, and there are two ways to do this: USB or Bluetooth. If you want to connect a USB controller to your phone, you need to make sure your handset supports USB host mode, which means you can use an OTG (on the go) adapter to plug in USB devices, including external storage, mice, keyboards and, of course, gamepads. Most controllers should work just fine, including Xbox ones and those that support USB HID class. PlayStation 3 controllers will also work, but you’ll need to find and install the Sixaxis Controller app from the Play store. Currently, it costs £1.64, but it’s worth every penny if you like PS3 controllers, and you can download a test version for free to see if the full app will work with your phone.

If you’d rather go wireless, then you can use Bluetooth controllers. The Sixaxis Controller app will allow that too, if your device is rooted. There are also apps that enable you to use a Wii Remote with Android, but it’s not a great controller for this purpose, so we won’t go into that here.

There are also quite a few dedicated controllers on the market, made specifically for phones, with one of the most well-known brands being Moga. The firm’s Moga Pro Power, for example, is similar in shape to an Xbox 360 controller, it connects via Bluetooth, and it even comes with an on-board battery to both power itself and to charge your phone. With one of these, your old phone can easily give a 3DS or PS Vita a run for their money.

Portable Storage


If you have a few old phones kicking about, then you probably have quite a bit of wasted storage capacity. 8GB here, 16GB there – it soon adds up. Rather than ignoring this potential, you can just hook it up to a PC via USB, and you have yourself a brand new (sort of), rather fancy-looking flash drive, which is also possibly expandable through SD cards. You could even connect to it wirelessly, using something like AirDroid (www.airdroid.com), whereupon that old phone becomes a basic NAS unit.

But you don’t need a computer to make use of this capacity. Thanks to OTG cables, you can plug in other external storage devices and upload the data onto your phone. This could be handy if you want to quickly copy data from a flash drive, or if you take a lot of photos or record a lot of videos while out and about. If you’re on holiday, for example, and the SD card in your regular stills camera fills up and you don’t have a spare on you, then you could transfer everything to this old phone, and also instantly view the shots on a screen that’s likely to be much more pleasant to look at than the one on the camera itself.

Portable Hotspot


Another one that could come in handy when you’re away from home. By inserting a 3G (or even 4G) SIM, you can carry your own personal wi-fi hotspot with you, potentially saving loads of money by letting you avoid hotel connections and so on. Of course, your phone has to support this, but most reasonably modern ones do, so that shouldn’t be a problem.

Why would you want to do it this way, though, rather than just using your current handset? Well, one good reason is battery life. Using both 3G and wi-fi at the same time will drain your battery at an alarming rate, and you don’t want it running dry in the middle of an important call. You could plug it into the mains, but that makes it difficult to use for calls and naturally limits your movement.

With a separate phone, all of these problems are eliminated. You can have your old handset plugged in permanently, and you can also place it wherever the best spot is to receive a cellular reception, without worrying about having to get to it when someone calls.

Another key advantage to this approach is that you don’t have to rely on your usual network provider. You might be on a contract with O2, for example, but prefer the look and the prices of the packages from EE or some other company. Assuming your old phone is unlocked and can accept SIM cards from other networks, you can shop around and find the best deal, whether that’s pay as you go or another contract. It’s probably a good idea to use a comparison site such as uSwitch.com to see what kind of deal you can get.

Mini Workstation


By using your phone as a media centre or games system, you’re essentially just making it function as a small PC. And just like a real PC, it can also be used for work-related tasks, such as word processing and editing spreadsheets.

Plug a mouse and keyboard into your handset (Bluetooth or USB) and hook it up to an external monitor, then all you need is the right app to have your very own portable workstation. A few years ago, there were loads of paid-for office apps in the Play store, but these days most of them are either free or subscription based. If you do want to make an outright purchase, then OfficeSuite Pro 8 is a powerful choice, which supports a vast number of file formats, including Microsoft’s. For £6.60 (at time of writing), you can view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, and you can save locally or to various cloud services, including Google Drive and Dropbox. There are also more advanced functions, such as a PDF camera scanner.

As good as OfficeSuite Pro is, however, it’s hard to recommend when there are so many free options available, including Google Docs, Docs To Go, Polaris Office and even some entries from Microsoft, such as Microsoft Office Mobile. Some of these require internet access to edit and create documents, but others don’t. Either way, they’re all perfectly suitable for everyday tasks.

Internet Phone


Thanks to the power of VoIP, people are able to talk to each other for free, no matter where they are in the world, just as long as they have a decent internet connection and either a computer or some other device that supports this technology. No prizes for guessing that Android phones are perfectly suited to this, and there are plenty of apps, including Skype and Viber, that will allow you to make calls over the net, using your home wi-fi connection.

Most of the time, it would be more convenient just to use your current phone, because that’s your dedicated communication device and will be the one you have in your pocket all the time. Where it might be useful to use a secondary smartphone, though, is in a multi-user scenario, such as your average family household. Rather than having personal VoIP accounts, you could set one up for your whole family. So if granny calls and she isn’t fussy about who she gets hold off, she no longer needs to spend money on calling your landline; she can phone your household VoIP line instead for free. Indeed, this makes a pretty decent replacement for a traditional landline, with the added benefits of being free and allowing for video calls and file transfers.

Torrent Downloader


You might not like leaving your computer on all day and night, but you probably don’t have any reservations about doing the same with a smartphone. That makes them perfect for torrent downloads, because you can leave them running overnight, helping you avoid traffic-shaping periods or just letting you extend your downloading time into your sleeping hours.

There are actually quite a few torrent clients for Android, including some no doubt familiar names (uTorrent and Vuze, for example), so you won’t have trouble finding one. Which one you choose is a matter of personal preference, of course, so it’s worth trying out a few to get the right one.

Downloading with torrents with these apps is as simple as it could be, and the biggest problem you’re likely to encounter, other than running out of capacity, is speed. You’re limited to a wi-fi connection (or potentially 3G, but that will expensive fast), and you’re unlikely to get the kind of download speeds you do with an Ethernet connected PC, so don’t expect them. What you do get, though, is convenience, and that could well be all you need to make this endeavour worth the effort.

VR Headset


Thanks to the Oculus Rift, virtual reality has once again found itself a firm foothold in the public’s imagination. But that’s an expensive option, and we don’t really do expensive. No, we’re more interested in Google’s solution: Google Cardboard.

Google doesn’t actually sell this product, but it did create it and release the design, as well development tools. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a cardboard headset, which includes two lenses and a section for you to place a suitable smartphone. The phone will display two images side by side on its screen, but when you peer through the lenses, you see one combined, 3D picture.

In conjunction with the phone’s camera, accelerometer and other builtin sensors, it makes for a surprisingly effective virtual reality experience.

One major drawback, though, is that when you’re using it, your phone is in a pretty inconvenient place to make or receive calls, and if a notification comes up when you’re playing a VR game, it rather breaks the illusion.

With an old handset, that obviously doesn’t have to happen, plus there’s also the possibility that you could improve the experience by using the spare phone as a Bluetoothconnected game controller for the one in the Cardboard.

We recommend trying out Trinus Gyre if you’re interested in using your phone as a VR device for your PC. This Android app streams video from your computer, but also maps mouse movements to the accelerometer of your phone, so you can look around in PC games by moving your head. Setting it up isn’t easy, but it’s worth a look if you think you have the time and patience to figure it out.

Security Camera


Because your average smartphone will have storage capacity and a video camera built in, they have pretty much everything they need to function as security cameras. In fact, they might even offer better quality video than a lot of dedicated units, and thanks to their internet access through wi-fi, they can even work as IP cameras, meaning you can see whatever they’re seeing, no matter where you are in the world.

Of course, there’s more to doing this than just putting your old phone in a corner of a room and setting it to record while you’re out. You might be able to catch intruders in this way, but you’re betting on there being enough recording time and that whatever unwelcome guests you have don’t just steal the phone too, taking all the evidence away with them.

A far better method is to have the camera record only when it needs to and to send the images to your email or someone other internet-based location, so you can catch whoever it is in the act.

What you need is the right apps, and there are a plenty of them available in the Play store. One good one to consider is SECuRET SpyCam, which boasts motion detection abilities, which will trigger its recording, whereupon it will capture either video or images, depending on what you want, from either the front or rear camera. From there, it can email you the results, save them or upload straight to a Dropbox account. It costs £2.99 but there’s a free demo version you can try first.

Another good option is IP Webcam. As the name suggests, you connect this to your home network, and then you can access it from anywhere, whether that’s within your home or on the other side of the world (as long as you have an internet connection, of course). It works slightly differently to SECuRET SpyCam, because it offers continuous streaming, so you can see what’s going on at any time of the day. On top of that, though, it also has motion detection and sound triggering, and many other notable features. The free version has advertising and a couple of extra features disabled, but if you want to go for the Pro edition, it’ll only set you back £2.38.

Selling And Trading


Although this article is about not selling or trading in an old handset, if do want to do that, then you have plenty of options. For a start, many networks themselves will take your old phone in part exchange for a new one, or they’ll give you cash. Carphone Warehouse also does this, as do Mazuma Mobile, Sell My Mobile and more. Prices vary, as you’d expect, so it will pay to look around to get the best rates for your old devices, rather than settling on the first reasonable offer you get.

Some, but not all, of these companies also sell phones, but if you’re looking to get a second-hand device, then you’re not going to be short of choices. Familiar names, like Cash Generator and CeX, are worth checking out, and there are also plenty of other reliable, independent sellers. Then, of course, there’s eBay, where you might be able to pick up a bargain directly from its previous owner, although for peace of mind, you might be better off buying from an eBay Shop or from Amazon Marketplace, where you have a bit more protection against unreliable or dishonest sellers.

Final Thoughts


When you think about how much smartphones cost and the degree of technology packed into them, it’s amazing that we change them every couple of years. Hopefully, we’ve been able to convince you that older phones don’t have to be abandoned and can have many uses you might not have even thought of. If not, then please do trade them in or recycle them – anything other than putting them in the bin.