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What should you do with an old smartphone?

My recent post on the death of a smartphone got me thinking about what should be done with an old smartphone that no longer has voice service. Once you’ve upgraded to a fresh device, is your old phone useful for anything other than collecting dust? It most certainly is, and here are a few ideas of what you might do with that old device.

Sell your old mobile phone

One of the first and most obvious things that you can do is to list your smartphone for sale or use a website service that allows you to sell mobile devices. Depending on the age and popularity of your old device, there could be a lucrative market out there awaiting your gently used phone. iPhones in particular seem to have a strong second hand sales market and many other phones do as well. If your old phone still carries some worth, why not recoup some of the cash that you gave up on your initial purchase?

Repurpose your old smartphone

Another idea is to repurpose that old smartphone. I’ve see many people reusing their old smartphones in a new way once they’re no longer used for traditional voice calls. There are many uses that you might consider. You can utilize the old rig as a dedicated media device for playing music, video and games, use it as a VoIP phone over WiFi with Skype or another app, use it as a portable storage device, use it as a remote control, use it for taking photos/video, or give it to a child to use as a toy. And let’s not forget, there’s always the option of donating that device to a friend or family member who could use an upgrade from their Motorola StarTac or a similar dinosaur.

Keep the old smartphone as a backup

Accidents happen, and what happens if your new device meets an untimely end? If that were to occur, it’s nice to have a backup phone that can get you back in business right away, avoiding the pressure of having to purchase a brand new replacement immediately. Personally, I always try to keep at least one backup phone to use in case of emergencies and sometimes use a backup on “risky” trips (to avoid the loss or damage of my primary device).

Recycle your old smartphone

Worst case, if you can’t find another use for your old device, recycle it! Retail shops like Target and Best Buy have bins for recycling old phones, so drop them off there instead of tossing them in the trash.

Do you have any other ideas for what to do with a smartphone after voice plan deactivation? If so, we’d like to hear your ideas in the comments below!

Disclosure: This article was a sponsored, paid post.

Go From Smartphone to Remote Control

The following is a guest post written by Bre Carter.

If you are anything like me, you probably talk less on your smartphone than any other activity. Texting, searching Google, playing games, and posting to Facebook all consume much more time than actually using the device for its main purpose. Communicating with each other has kind of devolved into a text based system that places a steep value on literacy. Fortunately for those who do not want to read, you can also turn your smartphone into a cool remote control for your home theater.

Most home theater systems require you to own several different remotes in order to control what you see and hear. This practice of remote control overload gets confusing really fast and keeps people from watching DVD’s or operating other cool features on their systems. By converting your smartphone into a remote control, you can do away with your useless remotes and enjoy the media that you want to.

Google TV Remote app

Instead of going out and purchasing a brand new remote with a specialized interface, most people are deciding to download free apps and products that convert their smartphones into remotes. While still costing up to $100, using a smartphone is a much cheaper option than the existing smart products on the market.

In order to use an app installed on an iPhone, you must purchase additional equipment from a retailer. Most televisions rely on an infrared system to communicate information with remote controls. According to PC World, you need to use products like NewKinetix for iPhone, or AV/Shadow for Android and Blackberry devices.

One of the most useful ways to control your television through your smartphone is the DVR. Companies like Direct TV, DISH, and AT&T U-Verse all have mobile websites that allow you to program your television. If you want to watch Jerry Springer, but have to work during the day, you can program the show from your office and have it waiting for you when you get back.

While the market for smartphone remote apps may be weak right now, once people start purchasing more smart televisions the need will start to increase. In order to get more brand recognition with consumers, brands like Samsung and Google will want to immerse their image in the minds of all of those watching with free apps.

If you are still only using your smartphone to make calls, or look up unknown numbers through Anywho.com, you are missing out on a wide world of diverse entertainment. Try exploring the App Store or the Android Market in order to find remote control options that fit your needs.

Editor’s Note: In our household, we use many Android remote control apps to manipulate our WiFi connected devices, including Google TV remote, Roku Wi-Fi Remote and GMote (used to control a laptop connected to a TV via HDMI). All of these apps connect to the device you’re controlling via Wi-Fi, so no additional equipment is necessary.

About this Guest Author: Bre Carter is a journalism student at Saint Louis University. Upon graduation, she hopes to travel the world while producing compelling content for the masses. When she isn’t writing, you can find Bre with her nose in a book, or her headphones in to block out the rest of the world.

The entertainment industry & US Government want to censor the Internet

Today, numerous sites across the web, including Wikipedia and Craigslist are “blacking out” in opposition of the Stop Online Piracy Act (in the House) and the Protect IP Act (in the Senate).

These pieces of legislation are particularly insidious. Crafted by the entertainment industry in an attempt to combat piracy, what they would actually do if signed into law would be to give the Government and private corporations a channel to censor the Internet.

These putrid acts would also have many other unintended consequences if signed into law, such as stifling US technological innovations, instilling a state of fear in all websites across the web (who could easily be banned for “linking” to copyright infringing content), putting huge burdens (both technical and monetary) on ISP’s in order to comply with blacklisting, damaging the Domain Name System and much more. Watch the video below to learn more.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

We strongly oppose SOPA, PIPA and any other legislation that would give anyone the power to censor the Internet any way, shape or form. If you value the freedom of information and the current experience of the web, PLEASE contact both your Senators and your House Representative today and urge them to oppose these acts and any other similar legislation.

For maximum effect, we recommend that you call, email, fax and write a snail mail letter (yes all of those) to your representatives in Congress. The more contact they receive, the more likely they will be to side with their constituents. Ask all of your friends and family to join in and TAKE ACTION, as the fate of the free Internet is at stake.

Call your House rep
Email all your reps (both your House Rep & Senators) through EFF, Google or DownsizeDC
Find your representative to snail mail or fax a letter
Find your Senators to snail mail or fax a letter

The death of a smartphone, goodbye Motorola Droid

My beloved Motorola Droid (OG) bit the dust about a week ago, thanks in full to a swift drop to the pavement that resulted in the top layer of the display getting cracked into a messy web of shattered glass (see image below).

A mixed bag of thoughts surged through my brain at the realization that this device had met its end. I got a glimpse of sadness, disappointment, fear, nostalgia, shock, disbelief and others. The emotional medley that I experienced was certainly surprising, but hey, we did have a history together. This little puppy had been my number 1 personal assistant for a span of over 2 years. To see it meet its demise unexpectedly was a bit unsettling.

This whole situation got me ruminating on the relationship that people have with their “smartphones” these days. These pocket-computing-systems are inanimate objects of course. They are mere possessions of the physical world, but like anything else that we extract some form of pleasure from, we develop emotional and subconscious attachments. There is a certain fondness or connection there that you might not take notice of until it’s severed.

But enough lamenting over a little circuit board and screen, because after all, in any situation like this, there’s always an upside. Due to this unfortunate event, I now have the pleasure am forced to upgrade my phone to a shiny, brand new device. Huzzah!

So as I head into the remainder of 2012 with a new state-of-the-art smartphone, figuratively attached at the hip, I pay homage and say goodbye to my Motorola Droid. It’s been a fun ride OG!

Bad news: Netflix burdened with longer DVD window

As if Netflix hasn’t had enough bad news recently, they’re now telling us Warner Bros. has extended the rental window from 28-days to 56-days. This means, instead of waiting a month to rent a new DVD or Blu-ray Disc, you now have to wait almost two months.

Warner Bros., along with many other Hollywood studios, had instituted a 28-day sales-only window for newly released DVDs and Blu-ray Discs in order to encourage disc-sales. Clearly the 28-day window was an homage to Danny Boyle, because sales of movies have not been bolstered by such a stupid plan.

It’s not clear why Netflix is entitled to such a long window as brick-and-mortar renters like Blockbuster (if they’re still into that sort of thing), and Redbox now get the titles a month earlier. Not that this was any different than before, because Netflix usually had long-waiting times for newly released movies anyway due to their demand. From reading the press release, it seems like they might be doing this to give UltraViolet and the Warner-owned Flixster an advantage over Netflix.

Read the press release after the break.
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Find large files taking up hard drive space in Windows with WinDirStat

Almost all modern day computer users have run into the pesky problem of filling up a hard disk drive (HDD) to near capacity. But once you’ve filled up all of your disk space with large files, or just a boatload of smaller files, how do you find what files are eating up all of that space? There’s no easy way to do it natively in the Windows OS, but thankfully there are many 3rd party tools to help you on your quest to find and clean files from your HDD.

My favorite at the moment is a completely free utility named WinDirStat. It’s simple, easy to use and has a very helpful graphical interface (screenshot below) that shows directory trees and file types in colorful blocks. As the program’s Help section explains, it ”Shows where all your disk space has gone and helps you clean it up.”

The image above (click for higher res) shows a completed WinDirStat scan on my Acer notebook’s HDD. I am just about at capacity and I needed to find out what was eating up all of my disk space so that I could delete some files.

I love how it color codes file types to give you a quick graphical view of how much the various file types are eating up your HDD. Notice all the blue? All of the blue blocks correspond to .MOV (quicktime video format) files that are taking up space on my hard drive. Quick time video files are by far the biggest hard disk space hogs on my system, eating up 61.6GB of disk space and 49.5% of my total HDD capacity.

With the disk space utilization information provided by WinDirStat, I will now be able to easily go in and copy off or delete the offending .MOV files, freeing up disk space and expanding the available free storage on my drive.

On other Windows systems, WinDirStat has helped me to find and eliminate temporary video editing program files and temporary ASP.NET files. Both of these file groups were eating up huge amounts of disk space and they weren’t needed on the systems at all.

What is your favorite Windows tool for analyzing disk space usage and identifying large files on your hard drive?

Google TV gets an upgrade

In the run up to this year’s CES Expo, a new teaser video has been posted declaring Google TV to be all new for 2012.

If you remember, we were looking forward to Google TV’s release, but when it came it was underwhelming. The remote was unwieldy, and the menus were less than intuitive.

On top of those problems, content providers were blocking the devices so the promising features were damaged.

Here’s hoping Google learned from their mistakes, made a few new content-providing friends, and is finally releasing a product worth buying.