The value proposition of old or used android phones as SBCs is insane! You’ve probably got some in your drawers, or can at worst buy some carrier locked ones for 30$. You get a device with better compute than a raspberry pi, with a screen, cameras, speakers, flashlight and battery attached!
Personally, I use them to run and monitor my 3d printers.
In my experience using an older android phone for self-hosting, the downside was a lack of ports and I/O. Being stuck with a single USB 2 interface and wifi was less than ideal for my use case.
Imagine the single USB C port being 40Gbit/s or even 80Gbit/s (USB 4 Version 2). Given a nice docking station and some additional enclosures, you could technically even connect hard drives and run the phone as a low-power NAS. Or/and as a multimedia station for your 4K TV, I mean the integrated GPUs are usually more than capable enough.
A bummer that they stick to USB 2 speeds, even for most high end phones.
The value proposition of old or used android phones as SBCs is insane! You’ve probably got some in your drawers, or can at worst buy some carrier locked ones for 30$. You get a device with better compute than a raspberry pi, with a screen, cameras, speakers, flashlight and battery attached!
Personally, I use them to run and monitor my 3d printers.
In my experience using an older android phone for self-hosting, the downside was a lack of ports and I/O. Being stuck with a single USB 2 interface and wifi was less than ideal for my use case.
USB/IP for a KVM switch might still work, as long as termux supports all that
Imagine the single USB C port being 40Gbit/s or even 80Gbit/s (USB 4 Version 2). Given a nice docking station and some additional enclosures, you could technically even connect hard drives and run the phone as a low-power NAS. Or/and as a multimedia station for your 4K TV, I mean the integrated GPUs are usually more than capable enough.
A bummer that they stick to USB 2 speeds, even for most high end phones.