[Today’s run: rest day]
Recently I bought a Motorola Droid 2 phone from off of craigslist. It has a broken power switch and it came with no battery. But I got it for only $10. I ordered a battery off of Amazon.com for under $5 (including shipping!).
I was able to fire it up. I cleared out the old owner’s contact list and text messages by doing a factory reset. Then I had to get around the Verizon activation screen, easily done after a bit of googling. The broken power switch is not that big of a handicap. To power up, just plug it in to a USB charger or to the computer/USB cable. If you want to power it down you have to take the battery out (I think I could also get an app to do it.)
So now I have an android cell phone without a phone activation. It talks to my household wifi; I can do browsing and youtube and that kind of thing. It can be a mini-Kindle or a game-boy.
I was thinking maybe I would try to learn a bit about Android application programming. I have downloaded the application development environment. That’s as far as I’ve got.
For $15, an interesting little toy.