It is disappointing to me that as companies, as engineers, and as people, we don't consider the end of life for hardware components.
There must be a better solution than building things that are expected to simply be thrown away.
There must be a better solution than building things that are expected to simply be thrown away.
With widgets, it shows my work email, personal email, the most recent tweet on my twitter feed, and my calendar for the next couple of days.
Additionally, I purchased a waterproof bluetooth speaker for the shower so I can turn on Pandora from the tablet each morning before I take a shower. The speaker has forward/pause/next buttons, so I can easily move past any song I don't like.
Overall, I've been pretty happy with the setup and it seems like a nice way to re purpose an older device I wouldn't necessarily carry around anymore.
Maybe like some service you link devices to and it gives you a list of all the various gadgets that it can turn a piece of hardware into.
If a digital device only costs a couple of bucks, and a better/faster/cheaper one comes available a year later, the old one is going to get tossed. How many people repurposed their 2005 iPods, and those cost real money?
Culturally we are accustomed to just tossing aside the old, particularly with electronics. We're going to need significant cultural/technical/legal/design shifts to keep up with these changes. And quickly!
Romo (http://romotive.com/meet-romo) is a cool example of repurposing old smartphones (unfortunately only works with iPhone 4 and above, but conceptually interesting)