Top 10 Ways To Turn Your Retired Gadgetry Into The Technology Of The Future

With the rapid progression of innovation each year, it’s easy to accumulate a pile of obsolete gadgets that you just can’t bear to get rid of. So don’t! Here are our top 10 ways you can take the retired gadgets you’ve already got and turn them into something that has a solid place henceforth.

We’ve seen how easy it is to turn an iPod touch into an iPhone using a few tricks and some sort of VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) service, and it’s such as easy with an old phone — so long as you have a constant Wi-Fi connection. It can be nice to have a home phone or two you can use to answer calls when your mobile phone isn’t handy, you don’t have great reception, and you don’t want to leave the VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) app unattended. So grab a mobile copy of Skype, Fring, Line2, or whatever, and leave it open and ready on your old mobile device. It’ll wait for someone to call it, or you can just pick it up and, say, order a pizza without the fear of but another dropped call.

Radios and routers aren’t specifically technology of the future — more of the past and present, as a matter of fact — nevertheless when you combine them with the internet you’ve without warning got a pretty awesome device for streaming music. The process isn’t even that complicated. All you actually need is a particular wireless router and a USB sound card. Pretty neat.

Even your old mobile phone, smart or not, has enough power to create a personal robot. The video to the left is proof of how an old mobile can create a “cardboard truckbot”. The additional parts you’ll need will only cost you $US30, and Cellbots provides instructions on how to put it all at the same time. You’ve likely got an old feature phone you’ve been planning to recycle for the past five years. In other words than wait for that day to never come, provide that gadget of the past with new life as talking, robotic truck.

XBMC is our favourite media centre software. It’s free and it’s better than it’s paid alternatives thanks to a slick, customisable interface that plays all sorts of media from the majority of networked and local destinations. It can pull content from the web, tell you the weather, double as a retro video game console, and much more. What’s in effect great is that it can run on a super cheap, underpowered nettop. That may as well mean your old computer is absolutely adequate for the job. Either way, you’ll be up and running a home theatre system that’s ahead of its time previously you know it.

The homes of the future will be automated

The homes of the future will be automated, nevertheless you can have that now with the help of an old router. Said router needs to be OpenWRT compatible and this project will require a few other things, yet if you’re up to the challenge you’ll be controlling your home from your smartphone on the cheap.

Creating an internet radio with an old router sounds like fun, nevertheless the touch screen netbook sounds like you’d be better off buying a cheap touchpad. The prices on the ‘hoda’ overlays are around $80 add postage, closer to $100, add hassle, cheaper to buy one ready made! Clearly if you’re into doing it for the fun, that’s another question altogether!#]

Couple of those things – I have an old handset that

Will have to try a couple of those things – I have an old handset that would do great as an Internet radio / dedicated Skype handset.