Repurposing Old Usable Cell Phones?

zentogo wonders: "As I stroll through the local recycle shops in my little Japanese City, I see boxes of used KEITAI-- Japanese Cell Phones. Most of them only a two or three years old, with more technology and features than any affordable phone in the USA, and they actually work! See, Japanese people cycle to new technology, especially phones, very quickly, and it is almost impossible for them not to. Take my own personal example: after one year with the telecom KDDI, I was given a free phone. It had more features than my previous one, and was much lighter, so when I was offered the deal I changed on the spot! So I wonder, what can be done with all these old phones? Can they be recycled for parts or even software? Can they be adapted to another type of technology? It would seem to be a big waste of decent hardware if something interesting couldn't be done with them."

Comments

Use?

[Murphy Murph]

They could all be used as alarmclocks!

Re:Old phones

[sakusha]

...take time (sic) to your local waste transfer station, and they will dispose of it for you in a way that the lead/mercury/other heavy metals dosnt leak into the environment.

Permit me to sermonize on my environmentalism pet peeve.

These heavy metals have already leaked into the environment, they just happened to be encapsulated into a little plastic cel phone instead of being buried deep in the earth. When you throw them away, there IS no "away," there is only "somewhere else." I compare this to people who incinerate trash to dispose of burnable trash, since the smoke is invisible they think they've gotten rid of the trash, but all they've done is put the garbage into the air rather than the landfill, and it becomes an air pollution problem somewhere else, rather than their local dump.
When you "recycle" your cel phone, it's going to get sent to a recycling dump in China where it becomes China's ecological disaster. Tons of cel phones sit in piles outdoors waiting to be recycled, while the metals leach out into the ground water. But nobody gives a damn because the phones are now someone elses problem.
The obvious solution is to stop buying crap cel phones that go obsolete so quickly, demand that manufacturers improve features through software and not by planned obsolescence in hardware. Do you REALLY need that 1.2 megapixel camera phone to replace your 1 megapixel camera phone?

Sell them?

[ThatComputerGuy]

I was at a mini "tech expo" on campus the other day and talked to some people from Cell for Cash. You go to their site, sign up, and they send you out a prepaid box that you ship the phone back in.

They say that the more recent phones are reconditioned and resold overseas. If a phone's too old to be of use, their partner (or someone?) recycles it and extracts precious metals, whatever those may be. The guy said it probably wouldn't be much money for my old, bulky Panasonic (if I can find it), but it's better than having it end up in a landfill I suppose.

Old NMT phones were converted to amateur radios

[latroM]

See http://oh3tr.ele.tut.fi/english/modifications.html . They need to be reprogrammed and need some hardware hacks but they work. I have an RD58 moppe on my desk which I use to make contacts through local 70cm repeaters. I'm not sure if that is possible for those proprietary phones.

SMS alarms

[LarsWestergren]

Some Ericsson and Nokia phones (and others too I'm sure) can be programmed by cable. Get a cheap refillable SIM card (such as Comviq or DJuice if you live in Sweden).

Hook up a laptop with Linux to the phone. If you have burglar alarms, fire alarm, flooding alarms on your summer house/boat whatever, you can hook them up to your computer. It is fairly trivial to write a script that, if one of the alarms go off, the phone SMSes you, the closest neighbour, your significant other.
"This is Lars's summer house. At 19.55 2003-03-14 the burglar alarm went off."

Drawbacks - the system can be a bit fragile. You must find a place for the laptop and all cables. SMSes aren't guaranteed to arrive on time, or indeed at all. You have to check that the systems boots up correctly after a power outage. And you can get a complete intruder system that is smaller and more reliable for not much money. Still, it is pretty cool in a geeky way.