Smartphones Recycled Into Devices That Detect Deforestation (opens in new tab)

This is interesting because I've often wondered how many people realise that a smartphone has an extremely dense collection of input/output devices that can sense and interact with its environment; most will have a touchscreen, speaker, microphone, camera, compass (magnetometer), accelerometer, gyroscope, light sensor, distance sensor, GPS, maybe even a thermometer and barometer. They also have radios for GSM/CDMA, WiFi, and Bluetooth.

Instead of only listening for chainsaw sounds, they could be watching and monitoring other aspects of the environment too.

The only downside is that the electronics in these weren't designed for continuous exposure to the outdoors, so they probably won't last so long... but if these were going to end up as rubbish anyway, it doesn't matter so much --- as long as they can keep up with installing new ones as the old ones fail.

Url changed from http://mashable.com/2014/06/26/recycle-smartphone-startup-de... because the current article seems a little more substantive.

This probably qualifies as a shower thought, but if every smartphone just had a tiny solar panel built into it, at EOL, each and every one could be utilized as some kind of periodic off-line sensor in some environment e.g. car GPS tracker or daily photo taker. This would extend each unit's useful life by several years in an interesting way.