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Okay, there is at least a random chance that some of us or someone in our family got a new smartphone as a gift this year. Maybe you hand the old phone down to one of the kids for a wifi device. Maybe you thought better of trading it in, and having your data end up on the streets.
There are the usual perennial articles on this subject Such as this one from a site that appears somewhat reputable, or this one from BusinessInsider.
Note: Most GSM phones can be used to call 911 in the US/Canada even without a sim card present. Donations to Charities or Women's Shelters or Homeless service agencies is always an option as long as you wipe the phone completely.
So what does the Savvy Soylentil do with the old Smartphone?
[Update: removed derogatory phrasing that was present in original submission. -Ed.]
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Monday December 28 2015, @01:57PM
Here's the official on topic thread, aside from the prog signalling spiral about racism and funny stories about people destroying phones.
So on topic I had never heard of dayframe, which looks cool as the ultimate bottom end use for a phone or tablet when its too slow to do absolutely anything else. Some problems, cheap LEDs don't last forever at 24x7 on after a long life, 4chan as an image source could be cool (not necessarily the pr0n and shock boards, either), and its 12 megs in size which will be an issue for total POS phones from five years ago. I would imagine dayframe, one of those weird gray market ebay android PC on a stick thingies, and a dedicated desktop monitor would make an unholy hell of an amazing desktop digital picture frame. I'm already thinking "mothers day gift" on this one. Note there are little low power automotive monitors if you don't want a 30 inch digital picture frame.
Some on topic apps they missed:
If you thought dayframe wasn't extravagant enough, I have radarscope on my phone and even subscribe for the lightning feed and because I'm a good boy and like to fund developers. Why not have a continuous radar display hanging on your wall. Likewise I can't use Waze because its too distracting while I drive (I'm a good enough driver to know when I shouldn't be Fing around, unlike, apparently, many other drivers) but plenty of people around me play with Waze when they are theoretically driving, so that would make an interesting real time traffic report when hanging on the wall. So on the bad side you can burn coal to run an art installation 24x7 instead of just checking the phone, on the good side, it looks cool and people do more wasteful things to look cool, so its not so bad, probably.
Torque the ODB-II scanner for the car. Also comes with cool heads up mode. The newer the car the more you get to see. My '97 Saturn reported nothing more interesting than a digital temperature gauge, my '14 toyota replacing it has an even sparser dash (the coolant temp is just an idiot light now) but the ODB-II port has way more telemetry like 4 or so catalyst temps alone and all kinds of stuff. Mostly useless. It is fun to "dyno test" cars with torque where it'll report peak and current HP output and all kinds of stuff like that. As a HUD, you could do worse. It can be a bit finicky at boot and shutdown. Speaking of cars, all the shade tree mechanics I know caught on to the "snap a pix while you disassemble" trick and a disposable phone is more compatible with grease, rust, and engine oil than a newer primary phone.
Somehow the article missed the kindle app. Reading is not cool, kids. But if it were, an old phone or tablet is a usable ebook reader. Much like at work I sometimes have more than one book on the desk, or more than one data sheet, or more than one monitor on my desk for some decades now, having more than one ebook reader is not exactly a problem especially when loaded with non-fiction / technical stuff.
Somehow the article also missed calculator apps. The battery is inconvenient but I've been thinking about more or less permanently setting up a calculator in my carpentry basement area. I'm pretty good at mental math but sometimes a calculator would be handy. And being a spare secondary device if I filled it with dust or dripped polyurethane on it or dropped it, I wouldn't be as annoyed as if I trashed my "real" phone.