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Probably a good time as any to replace it with something purpose-built anyway. A Raspberry Pi with a directional microphone and a custom app feeding said microphone data to a service like AudD or ACRCloud could readily do the trick without any of Android's extra baggage - though I do wonder how effective those services would be at detecting songs amid a bunch of background noise like Bop Spotter does via Shazam.

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Phone cameras are better than anything else you can get in the same form factor. The very expensive patents behind image processing algorithms keep good cameras out of the hobbyist world.

Same for 5G modems. A $50 phone will give you gigabit 5G, but you'll pay $500 to get that in non-phone form factor, mostly because on patents on the 5G tech which are charged differently for phones vs dedicated modems.

$50 ?

I think half the value of the phone here is the built-in battery

Perhaps, but it's also inexpensive to (properly) use one or more 18650s with a Raspberry Pi if that's what one wants to do.

I think the main advantage to using phones for random stuff is availability: We here on HN probably have a decent selection of old phones to pick from, so it doesn't cost any money at all to give a new purpose to one.

You can power a raspberry pi with that battery though.

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