[HN Gopher] Galaxy Upcycling: How Samsung Ruined Their Best Idea...
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Galaxy Upcycling: How Samsung Ruined Their Best Idea in Years
Author : avel
Score : 73 points
Date : 2021-07-19 17:31 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ifixit.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ifixit.com)
| kjaftaedi wrote:
| So sad to see visionless executives at a company so large.
| yeellow wrote:
| Do we really need Samsung for that? I like the idea and I have
| some spare unlocked phones. It would be nice to have a webpage
| with ideas and downloadable code. Maybe something like a custom
| system image that would change an old phone into a simple
| portable arcade machine or something.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Perhaps like a Kubernetes cluster of old phones. A quick Google
| suggests others have looked at this before.
|
| Edit: and I completely agree with you, we needn't have Samsung
| involved, as this doesn't have to be specific to their phones
| qwertox wrote:
| It's mainly the OS which causes smartphones and tablets to end up
| on the landfill.
|
| If it would be possible to install current, plain Linux on a
| device which can make use of a USB-Hub, in order to add a sound
| card, video camera, USB-to-serial or whatever it is, then these
| devices would get a second life.
|
| Imagine a smartphone with a plain Linux on it and an extrenal
| USB-HDD and USB-to-Ethernet-Adapter attached to it to now serve
| as a DLNA server, or a simple NAS for a backup of the family's
| photo collections.
|
| It's theoretically possible, but for some reason removing that
| Android and fully replacing it with a Linux/GNU system is close
| to impossible.
| thepete2 wrote:
| not really, there's postmarketOS. Although only a handful of
| devices work well, you _can_ still get some use out of many
| phones.
| svantana wrote:
| Honest question - wouldn't rooted android phones serve the main
| use cases of what you're proposing?
|
| To me, it seems the landfilling is mainly because people aren't
| technical and/or don't have any need for a tiny linux computer.
| jonfw wrote:
| Raspberry Pi has proven that people can find uses for tiny
| low-power computers if it's hacker friendly
| rohanphadte wrote:
| Incredible that Samsung never really launched this program. A few
| highlights:
|
| > "There is another way to create even more value" than
| recycling, Samsung said in a video at the time. "It's called
| upcycling." With code and creativity, upcycling could turn a
| Galaxy S5 into a smart fish tank monitor, a controller for all
| your smart home devices, a weather station, a nanny cam, or lots
| more. Upcycling not only kept your old phone from being shredded
| or stuck in junk-drawer purgatory, it could keep you from buying
| more single-purpose devices. It was a smart way to reduce our
| collective upgrade guilt.
|
| > The original Upcycling announcement had huge potential. The
| purpose was twofold: unlock phones' bootloaders--which would have
| incidentally assisted other reuse projects like LineageOS--and
| foster an open source marketplace of applications for makers. You
| could run any operating system you wanted.
|
| > But sometimes well-intentioned projects get muzzled inside
| giant companies. But that version of Galaxy Upcycling went
| nowhere. These days, Samsung is beta-testing an "expansion" of
| "Upcycling at Home," despite Upcycling never actually shipping.
|
| > Friends inside the company told us that leadership wasn't
| excited about a project that didn't have a clear product tie-in
| or revenue plan.
|
| > The world needs fun, exciting, and money-saving ways to reuse
| older phones, not a second-rate tie-in to yet another branded
| internet-of-things ecosystem.
| swiley wrote:
| Man I tried so hard to do that with my galaxy S3 which had an
| unlocked bootloader (I don't think it even needed an exploit.)
|
| Despite it's popularity though the ROM quality was extremely
| poor later in its life. I actually built my own busybox based
| OS for it from the GPL kernel source on Samsung's website but
| couldn't get most of the peripherals to work without all the
| Android stuff.
|
| I've totally given up on Android. Thanks to the mobile Linux
| "movement" (or whatever) there are multiple better options now.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's a very sad story.
|
| > _Samsung, a company without much of a public environmental
| message, was tossing around big ideas born at a grassroots
| level. This was something new. We were jazzed(...)_
|
| > _Friends inside the company told us that leadership wasn't
| excited about a project that didn't have a clear product tie-in
| or revenue plan._
|
| My guess: some team had a bright idea and managed to secure
| early associates and evangelizers before someone higher up
| started asking how the project actually synergizes with other
| company priorities. Since it obviously didn't, because it was
| something pro-consumer for a change, it got gutted, and the
| name reused to push some "value-add" IoT crapfest.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| > Friends inside the company told us that leadership wasn't
| excited about a project that didn't have a clear product tie-in
| or revenue plan.
|
| The fix for this is probably to charge manufacturers for
| ewaste, so they have a financial incentive to keep devices
| useful.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Most plans to charge manufacturers for e-waste seem to be at
| the point of original sale (where money is already changing
| hands). In such a scenario, Samsung probably doesn't get any
| credit for "making the same amount of e-waste in the long
| run, just slightly later after the sale for a subset of the
| devices sold".
|
| The way to produce less e-waste is to sell fewer units. That
| comes with an obvious problem for Samsung.
| ocdtrekkie wrote:
| Switch the plan to a core charge model: Require Samsung to
| collect old phones for a given cost. The more of them they
| can keep in use, the less it costs them. We know the core
| charge model works: Like 98% of lead batteries get
| recycled.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Upvoted for an elegant solution (at least for consumers
| upgrading phones). I do wonder if the lead acid core
| charge works better than the bottle deposit because the
| value is more, because it's not that much extra hassle,
| or some other factor.
|
| I also am not sure (and never thought about it until just
| now) as to where the forfeited core charge money "goes"
| for consumers who buy a new phone (paying the core
| deposit) and then don't return a core phone within the
| required amount of time or if they buy a brand A phone
| and return an old brand B phone.
|
| But I suspect that the overall model could work pretty
| well with some of the details carefully thought out.
| (AFAIK, in the lead-acid battery case, I can't just go to
| a parts store and force them to buy my core for $20, but
| if I am buying a new battery, they are forced to take my
| old core instead of charging me the $20 core charge [or
| whatever it is nowadays].)
| cryptoz wrote:
| > a weather station
|
| Galaxy S4 has a barometer, thermometer, and hygrometer. Such
| promise! And sad that more recent phones have ditched the
| latter two sensors, at least the barometer is standard now.
| Hopefully UV arrives soon as a sensor and air quality as well,
| and then soon you've got a nearly complete real weather station
| node.
| poisonborz wrote:
| If my memory serves well, those sensors were hilariously
| inaccurate. The same way generally most generic
| smartphone/SoC sensors are (except maybe gyro). Even as
| essential as a compass on recent smartphones requires
| constant hand waving to improve accuracy. Or try to get
| location in a city in airplane mode.
|
| With dedicated sensors and an rpi, much better purpose-built
| stations could be built for dollars, and that may be true for
| mostly any other phone recycling purpose I heard lately -
| apart from utilising them as networked cameras, due to the
| good onboard processing/lens that would be harder to achieve
| with off the shelve parts.
| 6510 wrote:
| A high end security camera has a battery, can detect motion, make
| & store the video recordings (both locally and on a server) and
| it has a sim card in case wifi or ethernet is disconnected.
|
| A video doorbell does something similar.
| turtlebits wrote:
| For a security camera, you need an IR array for night vision.
| Also cell phones draw too much power. (My cellular security
| camera battery lasts 3+ months).
|
| Also I once tried to use my Pixel 1 as a off-grid hotspot.
| After ~4 days I would have to reboot it to restore connectivity
| (even though the hotspot was still enabled)
| selectodude wrote:
| The funny thing is that Samsung is constantly throwing in free
| crap to try and get people to upgrade to their newer phones. If
| instead of yet another set of bluetooth headphones, they gave
| away free wireless doorbell enclosures or something, they could
| kill two birds with one stone.
|
| Granted, I've never been accused of having much imagination so
| maybe I'm missing the plot.
| poisonborz wrote:
| This would be a huge undertaking for support/maintenance, not
| even counting in that due to the SoC any kind of
| security/Linux update is out of the question. Slapping on an
| enclosure, adding an app, and calling it a day would be a
| major security liability.
| dmitriid wrote:
| Here's why, from the article:
|
| > Friends inside the company told us that leadership wasn't
| excited about a project that didn't have a clear product tie-in
| or revenue plan.
| shmageggy wrote:
| Of course. Current market capitalism provides no incentive to
| reuse, upcycle, or recycle. Throwing a billion phones into
| landfills is obviously shitty for the planet and all of us who
| live on it, but hey it's basically free, so why do anything
| else? Unless we change our economic system, the only way this
| will ever get better is when the monetary cost of waste
| generation matches the real cost to us and the world.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Or i might be more likely to buy something that doesn't turn
| into a brick in 3y.
|
| Toyota and Honda didn't get to where they are through planned
| obsolescence.
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