A much shorter life cycle than many other products and sales that have grown in recent years constantly have ended up transforming obsolete electronic equipment into one of the major problems for the present day, with millions of tons of waste produced by industrialized countries every year.The waste of electrical and electronic equipment (the so -called WEEE), therefore smartphones, tablets, laptops, wearable and so on, must be disposed of in the correct way for at least two reasons: prevent the polluting substances contained end up causing damage to the environmentand recover from the waste products the materials, even very precious and expensive, which instead can be reused elsewhere.
Fortunately, in recent years the sensitivity to this theme has grown exponentially, and more and more people no longer treat electronic products as common waste at the end of life but as special waste, just as it should be.In Europe, for example, the so -called "one by one" has been planned for years: when we buy a new mobile phone we can deliver the old one to the shop, without paying disposal costs.
However, there is another way that hits two objectives in one fell swoop, those of the reduction of electronic waste and the downsizing of the "USA without" paradigm: the reuse of the device.A PC with a hardware overwhelmed by time and now not pretty can be reused for example in the living room as a multimedia hub for TV, while a smartphone can be given a second life no less useful for the user of the first as an external hard disk ifIt has a good quantity of internal memory, or can be kept in the car to use it as a navigator, or even using it as a sensor of a smart - or smart home, to put it in English.The latter is the option that Samsung has in mind for its old Galaxy smartphones.
The Samsung Galaxy to be redeveloped
Samsung has recently launched an initiative that aims to give a second youth to the less recent smartphones, perhaps confined inside a drawer waiting for them to notice and decide if and how to dispose of them.Samsung's initiative, which represents an expansion of the Galaxy Upcycling program, has been called Galaxy Upcycling at Home, something that we could translate how "reuse your Galaxy at home".
In fact it is a sort of application located within the main app of Samsung for the management of smart houses and its intelligent devices connected to the network, or Samsung SmartThings.Better to immediately specify that the Galaxy Upcycling initiative is currently in the beta phase and therefore available in a small number of countries: the United States, South Korea and the United Kingdom.However, the fact that it has also been announced in Italy suggests that when the beta phase is finished it should also be available in our country.
The devices supported by Galaxy Upcycling at Home are all those of the Galaxy S series, Galaxy Note and Galaxy Z distributed starting from 2018 which are equipped with an Android 9 operating system and higher versions.In other words, these are Samsung Galaxy S9 and S9+, all the products of the Galaxy S10 family and those of the S20 and S21 families.Then there are all the Samsung Galaxy Note starting from Note 9, and finally all the folding, then the two Galaxy Z Flip (Z Flip and Z Flip 5G) and the two Galaxy Z Fold.Finally, but it is the easiest requirement to meet, the SmartThings app must be in version 1.7.63.22 or later.
The second life of the Galaxy
From the devices admitted to Galaxy Upcycling at Home, it is clear how the initiative can also be used through the most recent products (the Galaxy S21, for example, officially only in January 2021), but as we said it becomes quite interesting if exploited on smartphones (relatively)elderly such as Samsung Galaxy S9 which, having three years old, in the meantime it could have ended up in disuse.
In other words, the idea is to transform a possible refusal into an IoT (Internet of Things or Internet of things) device for the Smart Home in which it could act as a baby monitor or allow you to control pets remotely.At present Galaxy Upcycling at Home proposes only two scenarios of use, but as the Corean company itself specifies in the future the possibilities will be expanded offered by the number of supported Galaxy smartphones.
The Galaxy as a lookout, or as a sensor
Today the Samsung initiative allows Galaxy to precisely recognize domestic sounds and save certain environmental recordings to listen to them even when you are away from home.Example: the old smartphone detects a certain sound like the cry of a child, the meow of a cat or still someone playing on the door;At this point a notification to the reference smartphone is sent through which the user can decide to listen to the registration of the noises that triggered the notice.
The second possibility consists of a reprogramming of the brightness sensor that is present in any smartphone.Thus, for example, you can set the old smartphone that uses Galaxy Upcycling AT HOME so that when it detects a level of environmental brightness of less than one set as a reference automatically ignites the lights, the TV or trigger any other smart deviceat home connected to Samsung's ecosystem.
The company also thought about the fact that similar features end up impacting in a remarkable way on the battery of the device placed in the lookout, so Galaxy Upcycle AT HOME also includes ad hoc solutions for battery management therefore designed to minimize iconsumption by extinguishing all the non -essential components of the phone.