Sadly for our wallets, smartphones don’t last forever. According to stats, most people keep their devices for between two and three years before buying a new one — but old phones don’t just disappear from the world.
If you throw them in the bin, they end up as e-waste, taking up space in landfills. And if you keep them around, they also end up as e-waste, taking up space in your drawer. But don’t worry: there’s a solution to this conundrum.
I’ve been reviewing smartphones for the best part of a decade, and using them for even longer. And over the course of testing countless mobiles per year, I’ve naturally had to find uses for models that I’ve moved on from, to save them from cluttering up my flat.
And now I’m here to impart that wisdom onto you. There are loads of things you can do with a phone that’s no longer your daily driver — probably hundreds of things, in fact.
But I wanted a nice bite-sized number that didn’t list too many weird, niche ideas, so I’ve settled on seven ways I’ve breathed life into phones that I no longer use, but didn’t want to waste (I’ve not counted trading in your old phone, but that’s a valuable option too!).
Donated phone
This is probably the best use of a phone I can think of, although it’s not as imaginative as some of the other options on this list. If a phone no longer serves you, just donate it to someone who can use it.
There are loads of reasons you might no longer want a phone that won’t apply to someone else. Maybe you’ve been swayed by a newer model, have damaged one of the rear cameras, or no longer get the battery life that suits your needs.
But those downsides might not apply to someone else; they might not need the newest model, multi-camera array, or long battery life. Seniors, technophobes, and people who just don’t use their phone much don’t need the best Android phone out there. I know people who use 10-year-old mobiles.
I recently donated the Poco X8 Pro Max to my mom (well, pledged to, and keep forgetting to send it). It doesn’t have the camera array or streamlined build I like in a daily driver, but all she needs is a battery with a screen. If it can handle podcasts and the occasional video call to her children, she’s sorted.
Donating a phone saves your old mobile from cluttering up the already-stuffed landfill sites of the world, and lets your friend / loved one / colleague save money on buying a new mobile. Win-win.
Portable music player
I have an absolutely unwieldy music library; it takes up hundreds of gigabytes, and that’s only for about 4,000 songs. Thanks, WAV sizes. I know that’s just a fraction of the size of most audiophiles’ libraries, too.
Because of this size, I can’t store my music library on my daily smartphone. Not if I want to have any other apps on there. Of course, I could convert them into MP3s, and do so occasionally for MP3 player reviews, but I’d rather listen to my songs with as little compression as possible.
Thankfully, that’s where old smartphones come in. If I strip away my games, photos, and texting apps, I can use the device as a glorified digital music player to carry around my lossless tunes.
I prefer to do this on phones that have a headphone jack, a growing rarity these days, but a growing number of wired headphones come with USB-C options nowadays, so it’s not mandatory.
Another benefit of having a secondary phone as your music player is that you can leave it plugged into speakers without being tethered to them. I recently reviewed the Edifier M90 and played audio with USB-C a lot, and having an auxiliary phone I could plug into the speakers and leave behind was brilliant.
Ersatz 5G router
A few years ago, when I was moving flats, the internet provider announced that it’d take three weeks for our new service to start. This catastrophic event was turned around when I bought a cheap 5G SIM, plugged it into an old gaming phone I’d finished testing, and used the hotspot as an ersatz router for the time. I eventually wrote up the experience for TechRadar.
It wasn’t the fastest internet connection ever witnessed by mankind, but it was much better than you’d expect, with top speeds of 50mbps. My flatmate even managed to play League of Legends over it.
The range wasn’t great, and a phone can’t sustain that kind of hotspot use for a long time — in fact, I don’t think the phone was usable as an everyday smartphone after that. Plus, the device was basically constantly connected to a fan and a power bank to keep it going, and not everyone has that kind of kit.
But this was still a great way of using an old phone, helping me out in a pinch, and it’ll keep a device handy for a few more weeks before being recycled.
Portable reading machine
I’ve written a little bit about how I temporarily ditched my smartphone for an ereader, but on occasion, I’ve made the transition the other way around and transformed a phone into a portable reading device (technically, an ereader has E-Ink, so you can’t turn a phone into one, but this is the next best thing).
It’s a really simple process, and quite a fun one too: you begin by deleting almost every app off the phone. No social media, no Netflix, no web browser: delete, delete, delete. You basically just use the app store to download reading tools, and whatever apps your phone won’t let you delete (but usually, you can still remove them from the home screen).
By doing this, you remove distractions: this phone is for reading, not texting. Dramatically reducing the apps on a phone like this usually helps extend battery life, too, helping get some of that ereader magic. On most phones I’ve done this on, there are also screen technologies to change the color profile of the display: sometimes you can add grayscale, a warm hue, or custom filters to try and get a book-like feel. And don’t forget vision protection tools, which many modern mobiles offer.
Once you’ve dumbed down your phone and added some screen filters to get a paper-like look, you can turn an old phone into a portable little reading machine. It’s great for old phones, as the lack of processing power won’t matter, and a device like this will last a lot longer than your actual phone, so you don’t need to worry about it running out of charge.
Dedicated camera phone
As someone who reviews phones for a living, I move between them quite often, and frequently that involves downgrading from a great mobile to a lesser one. I can never rely on having access to a phone that’s fast, or has a good-looking display, or offers versatile cameras.
That’s why I always keep an old camera phone on hand. My chosen option is the Realme 13 Pro Plus; it’s not the best camera phone ever made, but it has capable main, zoom, and ultra-wide cameras. That’s basically all I need.
When I need a phone to take a good picture, I can pull out the Realme and instantly take something usable. It’s become my go-to handset for taking product pictures for reviews (it snapped the Nothing Phone (3) picture above, for instance).
Because the Realme isn’t my daily driver, I know it’s usually going to be charged and ready, and my product snaps aren’t going to clutter up my camera reel. Plus, I’ve set it up so pictures taken on the phone jump straight to my PC, ready to edit; I don’t want sunset pictures and selfies with my girlfriend to do that, because I don’t need to edit those.
Dedicated gaming phone
I’m incredibly picky about what phone I play games on. I’m often testing the best gaming phones, and I’ve discovered that it’s not all about power or display fidelity. Some of my go-to handsets for Call of Duty: Mobile remain older ones, which feel great to hold and sometimes offer extra tools.
For the same reason that I don’t rely on my daily driver for photography all the time, I like to have a backup gaming handset on the side that I can use for quick rounds or levels.
It doesn’t even need to be a modern phone; anything from the last few years with a Snapdragon 8-series chip, or one of MediaTek’s various higher-end offerings, invariably smashes gaming. And I’d much rather play on an older phone with physical shoulder triggers than the latest top-end phone, which requires me to use my fingers.
By not using my daily driver, I’m also avoiding getting interrupted by texts, calls, alarms, or Google Gemini, which seems insistent on ruining a good kill streak by jumping up for no good reason.
Portable power bank
A few phones, like the pictured OnePlus 15, have a feature called reverse charging. This lets you plug gadgets into the phone, via its USB-C port, to charge them up using the phone’s battery.
This feature, and a similar one which works wirelessly, is a great way for you to use your smartphone to keep your other gadgets powered up. In the past, I’ve used reverse charging to keep earbuds, tablets, and ereaders ticking along, and also to share some power with friends’ phones. It’s not as commonplace as you’d hope, but quite a few phones have it nowadays.
Side note: I’m accident-prone and have broken quite a few phones in my day through drops or smashes. This is a trait that began far before my TechRadar days and has continued up until approximately two weeks ago. I’m sure that poor phone won’t be my last victim.
Some smashed phones shouldn’t be used. If there’s even the slightest risk that the device has been ruptured, especially the battery, it’s best not to use a phone. But sometimes, a small nick in the screen stops the display from working, yet under the hood, the handset’s still working fine.
In one such case, it was on a phone with reverse charging. Because the screen was out of action, I couldn’t use it as my daily driver, but this powering function still worked wonders. For a while, I ended up using the handset as a portable power bank — it wasn’t much bigger than the average 5,000mAh charger you can buy from Amazon, and could even be used as a memory stick for storing data too.
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