Gadgetory

upgrading to the latest and greatest Android phone is always exciting but what do you do with your old Android phone well if you didn't have to trade it in with your carrier you may want to try reselling it Donal Bell and today I'm going to show you the steps involved in getting your old Android phone ready for resale before we put your old phone up on eBay or Craigslist we're going to move all of your important and personal data off of this thing and then reformat it like it just came out of the box and it needs the Samsung Galaxy s3 is my example let's start with what you don't need to worry about you don't have to worry about your apps google has a record of all the Android apps you've purchased so long as you're going to another Android device you can download them all to your new phone at no charge you also really shouldn't have to worry about your email aren't a lot of situations where an email would land on your phone and not also be backed up to your email host especially common ones like Gmail or Yahoo now if you're not certain about it it's an easy problem to test just find an important email on your phone and then use your computer to look up that same email you can go back and forth until you feel satisfied and then you can move on really the most important thing you should backup before we hand over your phone is your contacts fortunately Android makes these really easy to backup my best advice is to backup everything to Google contacts especially if you're sticking with Android Google contacts will follow you everywhere now to sync everything up open up contacts on your phone tap the Menu key and hit merge with Google tap ok and all of your contacts will be sucked into your Google account to check to make sure they all made the trip all right find the computer and log into contacts Google comm with your Google account everything should be there and if you see some doubles check out my how-to on how to get rid of duplicates once your contacts are merged they're just waiting for your new phone to pull them back down but to be extra cautious you can use that same contacts menu to export the list of your SD card or a SIM card another piece of precious data you may want to backup are your photos and videos there's a couple ways to do this but the fastest and most effective is to connect your phone to your computer using the USB cable that came with your phone on a PC it should pop right up as a USB Drive Mac users may need to install a small google app called android file transfer to get the same result all of your phone's photos and videos should be located in that folder called DCIM now you can just copy that folder over to your computer or if you have the room why not just copy the entire contents of your phone over to a backup folder just in case now what about all the stuff you're probably not thinking of your text messages call logs alarms dictionaries music playlists browser bookmarks to transfer these and there's one last sweep of your data I recommend installing a backup app for $5 an app like my backup pro will gather up all this stuff back it up to the cloud or to your memory card and allow you to sync it back over to your new phone it's money well spent so now that you've backed everything up the next step is to leave all of your personal stuff from this phone but before you do that you'll want to remove the memory card and the SIM card so that they don't get erased and so that you don't accidentally send them to the next person now first let's get the memory card out which is probably either on the side of the phone or in the battery compartment on the s3 you'll find the microSD memory card and the SIM card back here under the cover some phones might not have a memory card slot or they won't have memory cards installed but if you do find a memory card make sure the phone is powered down and then take the memory card out if you have Wi-Fi access you can take out the SIM card too otherwise you'll need it for one last step and then you can remove it at the very end so here's the moment where you get to feel like a secret agent or maybe get to experience panic attack but we're going to erase the phone full factory reset so we're going to boot it back up go into settings and then back up and reset some Android devices we'll have this under security or storage so look around if you don't see it right away at the top here you'll see some options for backing up some Android data and settings to your Google account make sure they're checked on and that you have a backup account selected it may trigger a brief backup but chances are if these settings are already on that Android has been backing up these settings in the background all along after that the final stop is this button down here for factory data reset the we'll reset the phone back to its original state and delete all the data on the device tap it and you'll see a warning of some kind but just remember it's not deleting your accounts it's just deleting any trace of you from the phone you really don't want the next person you give this phone to to have access to your personal accounts and information when you feel confident hit reset device the phone will now reformat itself and restart when it turns on again you should see that same welcome to Android screen that was there the first time you got the phone all right it's finally time to say goodbye so go ahead and shut it down one last time remove the SIM card if you haven't already clean the phone with a nice dry cloth gather up any cables or chargers that came with the phone and if you still have the original box that can help the resale value if you're selling this thing online so there you go that's my best advice for preparing your old Android phone before switching over to a new one been good to me s3 more tips like this head over to how to cnet.com i'm donald bell thanks for watching