Samsung breathes new life in your old phones

Galaxy Upcycling at Home. © Samsung Electronics.

Raise your hand if you have old phones lying around the back of a drawer! To find new use for this tech flotsam, Samsung has launched its innovative “Galaxy Upcycling at Home” program that repurposes phones into smart home devices through the SmartThings app. Crying baby, barking dog or meowing kitty? Your outdated phone, if it’s converted to a sound sensor, sends an alert and an optional recording to your current phone. Or you can turn your phone into a light sensor. Overall, Samsung’s program is a fairly modest start as it only uses the microphones and light sensors on obsolete devices. However, the company could do a lot more to limit e-waste by converting phones’ outmoded cameras into IP cameras, which would be a popular way to make archaic gadgets useful. Samsung mentions that the Upcycling at Home feature is available on all S, Note and Z series released since 2018 running Android 9 and above (so that’s the S9, Note9 or higher). More devices will be supported in the future.

⇨ Samsung Newsroom, “Samsung Electronics expands its Galaxy Upcycling Program to enable consumers to repurpose Galaxy smartphones into smart home devices.”

⇨ Ars Technica, Ron Amadeo, “Samsung starts official smartphone upcycling program.”

2021-04-21