What to do with an aging android tablet.

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NightShade

Sharpshooter
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So I finally had to break down and get a new tablet. Usually I buy a refurbished one that is a couple years old and cheap. After a while it gets a little slower and then either the wife ends up with it or the mother in law. It's a cheap way to stretch them out. Anyway that has worked good so far but at a certain point the batteries will quit holding a charge no matter what happens. The one I have used for quite a while was at that point, by the time it was off the charger and not really active I could put it in the car and go somewhere then pull it out to use it and it would die before I could even pull an application up.

Anyway it still works ok when it is plugged in so I wanted to find a use for it. I know some people are now using them with an amp to replace their vehicle stereo but that is a LOT of work and I would rather not go through cutting up the dash to make it fit. I have seen where a person used an old tablet for their home automation controller but I don't think that will be very useful at this point. After racking my brains a bit and searching I came across something that would work perfectly, I am going to use it as a picture frame and a media player.

Not too long ago I picked up a little bluetooth adapter so that my wife can listen to some music around the house through a stereo that she has probably had for 15 years now. It works fine so I figured why not give her a little something to play with. Then on the old tablet I setup Syncthing and made a folder that I can drop stuff in to load pictures on to the tablet wirelessly. After that I grabbed Fotoo and set it up to play pictures from the folder Syncthing is setup to load the pictures in to. Add in Plex and connect it to the bluetooth adapter and she can play music whenever she wants. I think it will work as a nice little media player and picture frame.

I did drop something together for those who would like to see what it kinda looks like. The camera's auto focus is a little weird since it is recording another screen but it shows what it looks like for the most part.



If someone wants to set something like this up on their own but is confused on how to do something let me know and I will help you out.
 
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I have some that I use as additional monitors for my surveillance system. One just stays plugged in sitting on my bedside table propped up and running the video feed. If I hear something I can just look over to see whats going on.
 
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The batteries may be replaceable. I had my iPhone 6s battery replaced not long ago. It wasn’t lasting two hours without being on the charger.

Batteries + did the replacement in less than 45 minutes.
Hope you got the warranty replacement from Apple. They had to finally admit they put substandard batteries in the iphone 6 models and offered to replace them at reduced cost at authorized repair centers.
 

NightShade

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Batteries are replaceable. Already went that route and after two duds I did not have the desire to continue throwing money at a tablet made around 2012 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nexus_10 The other issue was that opening up the web browser and waiting for over a minute for it to load and another minute to load a page made it only useful for very small apps and often reboots.

As far as shooting it sure I could have done that but I get to save a hundred bucks or so on a digital picture frame that I can still use for other things while plugged in. I'm not in the habit of burning hundred dollar bills for fun but if someone else is send them my way I can put them to good use.
 

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