What Do You Need to Do When You Sell an Old Mobile Phone?

Smartphones are more than calling devices these days. You can store a lot of personal and professional information, data, pictures, and videos on mobile phones that we cannot risk losing. 

Smartphones are getting smarter day by day, so you should also upgrade your level to catch up with the world. Isn’t it? 

But, only buying a new phone is enough? Safe selling of your used mobile phone is equally needed. In case you are looking to sell old mobile phone, you must take into consideration that important information must be removed from it to avoid unauthorized access to your data. 

There are quite a few things which you have to keep in your mind before handing over your old mobile phone to a new user. This seems a tough task to perform but it is as important as protecting your valuable information. 

Not sure how to do it? Don’t worry, Here we are providing a quick guide to help you to protect your data and get the maximum resale value of your old mobile phone. Follow the steps to ensure your phone is safe to vend at its best market price! So, let’s begin. 

Things You Should Do Before Selling Your Old Mobile Phone 

  • Backup your mobile phone data 

This is the first and foremost step that you must take. The reason behind backing up your mobile phone’s data which includes your contacts, email addresses, photos, videos, and many more to a safe place, from where you can easily transfer the valuable data to your new mobile phone. 

If you are an Android user, then you mostly rely on Google apps on your smartphone in which Google Sync backs up most of your data automatically. But for the safer side or to check that your all media and WhatsApp backup, you should go to the setting > Accounts > Select Google account > now check everything you want to sync. 

There is one more way in which you can directly transfer your data as a backup through a data cable or a memory card. You can save all the data on laptops or PCs. 

There is one more backup that you should keep in your mind and that is WhatsApp backup. It is one of the most important backups that you should have. Whatsapp chats backup is nothing but gentle information that anyone can need at any time.

Create a chat backup from WhatsApp settings on Google before shifting to a new phone. You can choose to include or not include some files, and media in your chat. After doing this Whatsapp chat backup, when you do a fresh install of WhatsApp on your new device, you can restore the chat backup. 

And if you are an iPhone user you can back up your data to iCloud. Before backing up your data via iCloud make sure you have activated the iCloud backup feature by going to settings >iCloud> Storage & Backup. 

  • Remove all accounts linked to the device 

After backing up all the data from your phone to the safe side. The second thing to do is, make sure to remove all linked accounts which contain your personal information from the smartphone you are selling. This will include your Google account, Microsoft account, WhatsApp account, social media profiles, etc. 

  • Encrypt and factory data reset your phone 

After having a backup of all the data of your phone, now comes the step which has no-returning point,” Factory Reset”, which will erase all your phone’s data permanently. So before moving to this step makes sure you have performed the first step completely and successfully and secured your all data to a safe place like in Google sync, laptop, or pcs which you will need later. 

To perform Factory Reset on an Android Device, you simply have to go to Settings > Backup & Reset > Factory Data Reset. It takes some time. If in case, you have forgotten to remove your SD card while doing the factory data reset process, then don’t worry about it. Because all the data in the SD card is safe while working on this process. It will not erase the data contained in the SD card. 

For iPhone users’ factory data reset, go to settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content. Though Factory Reset removes almost all the data from your mobile phone, still there is a way to recover some leftover data that is likely to be missed by resetting. 

So for more assurance of secure data removal, you need to encrypt your device before performing the reset. Check if your mobile device is encrypted, if not then simply go to manual settings and encrypt your leftover data. When you encrypt your device, it scrambles all your data and makes it difficult to read by unknown. Encryption makes it very hard for someone to access data on your phone after a factory reset. This ensures that data would not be able to be recovered by anybody and your phone is safe to vend. 

  • Remove SD Card & SIM from your phone 

After doing factory data reset you will find that your phone is empty now, but still, your phone is not empty until you safely remove your SD card and SIM card. These two contain a lot of personal data in them which you would not want to lose anyhow. Removing SIM and SD cards vary from model to model of phone. So if you face any problem in removing it, then you can see the manual guide which you could get at the time of purchasing in the phone box. Otherwise, you can call the company’s customer care executive for safe removal. 

  • Disable Your Passwords 

Well, this is considered one of the most important steps that you should take before selling your mobile device. Phone owners will have passwords, as well as security patterns, initialized on their smartphones to protect them. 

However, note that if you decide to sell your phone to someone that they will need your passwords and will need to know the security patterns of your phone to use it. So, it is important to disable all of your old passwords and security locks so that the new owner of your phone can use it without any issues. 

  • Clean your mobile wisely 

This is undoubtedly a small but important thing to follow. It gives the customer the feeling that he is getting his money’s worth. So cleaning your mobile phone inside out properly before selling is a great gesture to do. Here is what you need to do to your phone to give it a new look. 

  • Use a microfiber clean cloth and alcohol or a mobile cleaning liquid to clean the keypad, screen, and plastic of your phone. 
  • Make sure you avoid ammonia-containing liquids to clean your phone because instead of cleaning it damages your mobile phone. 
  • Use a cotton cloth to clean the inside of the ports of your phone. 
  • Be careful if you use any liquid for cleansing the phone. If liquid oozes into the headphone jack and charging port it will damage the ports. 
  • Cleaning an old phone before selling is not a must but just a step to get rid of the traces of dust which will somewhere help in getting a good price against it
  • Put all the accessories back in the box 

Don’t forget to put all the accessories like the adapter, data cable, earphones if you have them, etc. back in the box that came when you purchased it. 

Now you are good to go to sell your old mobile phone. 

Finding a Good Deal for Your Old Mobile Phone!

Well, your old mobile phone is ready to sell after taking all the steps given above. If you follow these steps, your data will be safe but here comes the most important part to perform, and that is finding the right platform and a buyer that will give you the best deal against your device. 

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