Hi I have two old phones:

* HTC Magic (bought summer 2009)
* HTC Incredible S (bought spring 2011)

Both are a bit scratched so I don't expect a significant resale value. Does anyone have an idea what to do with such old phones? Any cool hacks etc.?

Thanks!

They aren't that old, so i guess you could try to sell em

If you're going to throw them out, take the extra effort to send them to a phone recycling company where the parts can be broken down in reused for new devices.

The Incredible S is a relatively new phone, if you sell it on ebay you could probably get at least $150 to $200 USD depending on the condition. The HTC Magic is older so around $50 USD you could expect once again depending on condition.

If you want to keep them you could try rooting, flashing ROMs on them. It will help teach you the process if you haven't done it before without worrying about bricking your main phone. Check out Cyanogenmod they are a very popular 3rd party Android ROM and you'll often notice better performance with them versus the OEM Android installation.

You can also use them as wifi devices to stream music from Pandora, etc.

Dont throw them away.

My HTC Kovsky and Universal both have died by bad flex cables.

Put linux on them. Or dedicate an armv7 device to testing ReactOS. Would be nice to see it work on a wide range of armv7 hardware.

Send me the Magic. Seriously.

Burn them or sell them to me. I'm sure they'll make my iPhone 3g seem like a ti-84.

Do not burn them, recycle them! Or just donate them to some place. Alternatively try selling them.

Donate them.....to me

Don't toss them out. Either keep them to play around with (custom ROMs, etc) or give/sell them to someone else.

Thanks very much for the suggestions everybody! I would not throw them about but I'm still considering if I can put them to good use myself. For instance as a portable music player (I guess if the radios are turned off, and screen most of the time, the battery life will be longer than when used as a phone) or maybe as a GPS in the car, even though it's not ideal. But there could also be other cool things I hadn't thought of. Could be fun to put Linux on it. I have rooted both of them and used various ROM's so I'm fairly experieced with that process.

The Magic is in a very poor condition - the antennas almost aren't working. So I think as a phone, it's gone. But as a cheap "CPU with a touch screen" platform it might still have value.

Thanks!

Root them, install GCC, compile nginx... Mobile Web Servers!

Or burn them...

Now I remember how I ran phpBB on my iPod touch with Lighttpd, PHP, and SQLite.

Global warming



That must have been reliable . Did you do it over 3G (would cost a bit)

not really, I've ran web servers over 3G, slow as [censored], but it kinda works (if you don't mind waiting 3 minutes to load your site with plain HTML and 2 images).

My post was sarcastic by the way.

iPod touches don't have 3G (yet), I did it through WiFi. Was a bit slow, but generally OK (although the device was very hot).

Yeah, I thought we were talking about phones, ie. iPhone, so yeah, WiFi would be faster.

Use the HTC Magic as a music player. Thats really their only purpose now.

For both of them, install a custom firmware. If you don't do it on the Incredible at least do it on the Magic. The magic is a slower phone and will be slow doing tasks unless all the crap is taken off of it.

Incredible.... Put it next to the toilet so you can play angry birds? XD

EDIT: That's what I used my LG Vortex for until it decided to fry itself.

Brick them...

let me guess, evdo or 1xrtt?

Use real (GSM/HSPA) 3G then you'll be pleasantly surprised