I cracked my Samsung S5 Galaxy phone earlier last week. eek.

Luckily my upgrade was up so I could buy a new phone but what was I going to do with my broken one?

My options were basically as follows:

Shell out tons of cash to get it fixed. It starts at $100 and only goes up from there in terms of time and screen size replacement. Get pennies for recycling it. Most recycling providers are a rip off anyway. You’ll fetch about 30%-50% of the market value after all the time you’ve spent recycling it.

The Real Solution

I quickly realized that this was a bad mindset, I forked out a lot of money to buy this phone. I called up some of my friends in Silicon Valley, the cornerstone of technology in the world, and came up with a better idea.

Here’s a list of 3 really good ways to use an old or cracked Android.

Perch will take your used Android phone and turn it into a home monitoring camera. It’s pretty sweet. I found them on BetaList.com and was able to be part of their android Beta Testing program so they let me in really fast. You might have to wait in line, but this is a great option for anyone who is a mother, father, pet owner, older sibling, or home automation/smart home/ internet of things enthusiast.

Placemeter allows you to enable your phone as a larger part of a sensor network for modern cities at a huge scale. If you’re up for participating in a very large experiment of sorts, this is a great option.

Verizon’s 1 Million Phone Drive campaign helps fight domestic violence. Verizon donates wireless phones, complete with service and data, to local domestic violence shelters and non-profit organizations and agencies for use by victims and survivors. It’s definitely a worthy and relevant cause.

What will you do with your cracked phone?

Looks like there’s a ton of great choices out there besides scrapping your cracked phone. I ended up taking my Galaxy S5 and using it with Perch. I’ve wanted a camera to check up on my dog while I was at work but didn’t want to buy an expensive security camera so this was perfect.

I also found a very old android in my drawer and plan on donating it to Verizon!

I hope this has been helpful on creative ways to use a broken Android. If you have a unique way to use your cracked Android phone I’d love to hear about it!