In recent years, the use of mobile phones and tablets for personal communication has increased dramatically, with over 1 billion smartphones out of a total of 5 billion mobile phones worldwide. The infrastructure and technology underlying these devices has improved to a level where it is now possible to integrate sensor technology directly and use them to acquire new data. Given the available resources and the number of technical challenges that have already been overcome, it would seem a natural progression to use mobile communication technology for field-based environmental monitoring. In this work, we review existing technology for acquiring, processing and reporting on environmental data in the field. The objective is to demonstrate whether or not it is possible to use off-the-shelf technology for environmental monitoring. We show several levels at which this challenge is being approached, and discuss examples of technology that have been produced.