It’s a common scenario in many homes, that an old smartphone that is sitting unused in a drawer because a glitzy new model has replaced it. Just because it’s a couple of years old and isn’t the latest anymore, an old smartphone is still a handy minicomputer stuffed with all manners of working sensors, and a few simple steps will transform it into a functional tool that can complement your everyday life

Scientific Research

If you’re willing to donate your smartphone’s idle computing power to advance scientific research from around the world—medical therapies, filtering data from satellites to discover new planets and stars—all you need to do is install the BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) app for Android. Researches can then tap the unused processing power, however meagre, towards analysing data and running simulations that would otherwise have to be run on dedicated supercomputers.

olmdesk@outlookindia.com