alt Hacker NewsYou could consider getting an older flagship phone perhaps 2022-2023 and have a strong portable device with a decent amount of compute power and not to mention ram. I'm starting to believe that these devices are under utilised and we will see some interesting applications using either with AI or without.
I particuarly think the economics of this are interesting, if you take the one plus 11 you can get one for around £200-250. The CPU is very capable and the alternatives are a PI 5 or N100. You get 16b of ram, a screen, gps, bluetooth a camera... the list goes on.
These devices could really shine as edge computing devices and I believe they are overlooked.
Replies
It does have the same problem as using a laptop as a server: the battery will fail. But it's a nice UPS until then.
The problem with modern smartphones is that they run on battery, even when plugged into external power. You cannot use it without the batteries without some more hardware hacks. As the batteries aren't designed to be always in a fully charged state, if you decide to use the phone with the battery (with 24x7 power supply) then you also have to carefully monitor the batteries too. Batteries tend to heat up when charged / discharged, old batteries can also bulge or, worst case, even explode. Another thing you need to consider is cooling - Smartphones are designed with the idea that their CPUs won't run at 100% for a very long duration. A smartphones CPU, Camera, battery etc. tends to get hot on prolonged use. So if you are, for example, planning to use it as a mini webserver or media server or as a 24x7 streaming cam, you need ensure it remains adequately cool. And ofcourse, the best smartphones for these kind of projects is one capable of running Linux.