June 18, 2026
From toilet bowl to dot-com
Smashed Toilet Phone Web Server
A toilet-dunked, screen-dead phone became a website and the comments went feral
TLDR: A smashed Samsung phone with a dead touchscreen was revived and turned into a tiny website host, proving old devices can still be useful. Commenters turned it into a drama fest with toilet-rice jokes, battery fears, and accusations that the whole thing secretly promotes a crypto-flavored service.
A battered Samsung phone that was smashed, dropped in a toilet, and left in rice for a year has somehow clawed its way back to life as a tiny website host — and honestly, the internet is far more obsessed with the backstory than the gadget trick itself. The owner discovered the phone still powered on, even though the screen no longer responded to touch, then hooked it up to accessories and turned it into a simple web server. In plain English: this dead-looking phone is now serving webpages instead of texts, which is exactly the kind of absurd comeback story commenters live for.
The crowd reaction split into three glorious camps. First: the disgust comedians. One commenter delivered the instant classic nobody can unread, begging for confirmation that the toilet-water rice was thrown out and not cooked. Second: the safety police, already gearing up for a battery panic over leaving an old phone plugged in all the time — a debate the author basically predicted before anyone even started. Third: the skeptics, who smelled promotion drama and accused the post of sneaking in an ad for Qik, calling it a pile of web-hosting buzzwords mixed with crypto vibes.
Still, not everyone came to throw tomatoes. Some readers were genuinely delighted, calling the project awesome and asking whether the phone was serving the whole site, right down to the fading background image. Others got wistful, saying they’d dreamed of reusing old phones like this for years — if only mobile data plans weren’t such a buzzkill. It’s part survival story, part junk-drawer genius, and part comments-section food poisoning joke.
Key Points
- •A damaged Samsung A70 still powered on after long-term storage, but its touchscreen no longer functioned.
- •The article argues that Android’s support for external input devices allows a touchscreen-disabled phone to remain usable.
- •The author repurposes the phone as a web server, presenting it as a basic starting point for reusing old smartphones.
- •Several Android server setup options are mentioned, including Java, Kotlin, Apache with PHP, and Termux.
- •The hardware setup uses a USB-C hub for continuous power and peripheral connections, including wired ethernet.