Smartphone Evolution and Reuse: Establishing a More Sustainable Model

The dark side of Moore's Law is our society's insatiable need to constantly upgrade our computing devices. The high cost in manufacturing energy, materials and disposal is more worrisome the increasing number of smartphones. Repurposing smartphones for educational purpose is a promising idea and shown success in recent years. Our previous work has shown that although different components in smartphones degrade from use, their functionalities, available resources and power supplies are still able to satisfy the requirement of educational applications. In this study, we demonstrate the potential benefits of reusing smartphones by analyzing their manufacturing and life-time energy. The key challenge is the design of software that can adapt to extreme heterogeneity of devices. We also characterize different types of heterogeneities among different generations of smartphones from HTC and Apple, including processing capability, storage resource and various features. We propose insights to aid establishing a sustainable model of designing mobile applications for phone reuse.