I’ve got an old Lenovo Tab3 850M table, running Android 6.0.1
It’s pretty vanilla and I haven’t installed any custom ROMs or rooted the device. The battery is in pretty good condition and the table can idle for around a week I think.
It has an 8 inch IPS display, Quad-Core 1.0GHz ARM Cortex-A53 CPU, ARM Mali-T720 MP2, 500 MHz, 4-Cores GPU, 2GB of RAM, and 16GB internal storage. The cameras are pretty terrible (even for 2016 standards), and the battery is 4300mAh.
What useful things can I do with it?
Make a smart mirror that can display the time/weather/calendar etc.
Homeassistant control panel
Android 6 and 2GB RAM are still pretty sufficient, that should run everything important. I’d try to flash some lightweight ROM (maybe with higher Android) or at least debloat, and just use it normally for whatever I’d use a tablet for.
First, I’d suggest flashing a community system ROM. OEM systems are both very bloated, and stop being supported much earlier than community ones, so they’re not ideal unless you need to use it with some banking app or the sort. And if you don’t need Google’s services (de-Google, anyone?), I strongly recommend going for a vanilla system instead of a Gapps one.
Now, as stated in MargotRobbie’s comment, one good use is as a media player. If you can sideload stuff like VLC and Librera Reader, you should be covered.
You can also use it for some lighter gaming, if that’s your thing, as there’s plenty of emulators, wrappers and engine implementations for Android.
You can also use it for running servers, if you do this sort of stuff.
And if you like to test around with softwares, a spare Android device is pretty good to have.
I checked the XDA forum a bit, I found this but I’m not sure on how to unlock the bootloader, install TWRP and flash the ROM?
I had once bricked this tablet while playing around with rooting it and I had to take it to a repair shop. So I’d appreciate if there were working unbrick instructions and also working instructions on how to install TWRP.
What kind of servers could I run on this spec?
Use it as a digital picture frame.
