Gadgetory

there comes a time in every smartphone users life when it's time to move on when it's time to go from the old and replace it with the new but there are some steps that you need to do do you want to leave your old just sitting there on the shelf gathering dust maybe you want to give it to a family member sell it to a friend or maybe even put it up on a classifieds website but it's got all of your personal information on it you don't want to give it away with all of that so how can you wipe everything and get it all ready for whoever it is that's going to take on your device and give it new life that's what we're going to talk about on today's episode the Android power user so I'm going to show you how to do this on for devices the steps are pretty much the same but there are a few things you want to keep in mind there are also a few things you want to keep in mind if your device can use an SD card like these two devices can but these two devices cannot so what do we have this is a t-mobile g2 this is a samsung galaxy nexus of course the motorola droid razr HD and the nexus 7 from google this is the t-mobile g2 or the HTC Desire Z in its generic version it's running right now a cyanogenmod nightly version 7.2 point something or other which means it's running gingerbread android 2.3 point 7 so how are we going to go ahead and take care of this let's go ahead and hit menu on the home screen and go into settings from there we're going to come down to privacy and factory data reset from here this does have an SD card slot it does have an SD card in the slot so we're going to go ahead and say erase that now word of warning sometimes this isn't erasing what you think it's erasing meaning some phones have an internal SD card and an external SD card you might not know which it is my advice take the SD card out of your device after you've run through this whole process just a lot easier you're going to be in there to get your sim anyway so go ahead and do that we'll go ahead and reset phone and now ask you if you want to reset everything and yes we do want to erase everything in this case you can see I've got a problem it's saying i have an invalid path no so let's go back try this again without the erase SD card and go from there you can see that was causing me a problem because well I don't have anything on my SD card and some developer didn't write for that contingency it's going to go ahead and run through the process usually this will involve a reboot maybe two while it wipes everything off the phone this is currently my daily driver it's the Samsung Galaxy Nexus the GSM variety but i'll show you the first steps on how you i'd go about erasing this one thing to keep in mind this does not have an SD card in it so i don't have to worry about any of that i'm going to pull down the notification shade and then hit my settings button from there instead of going to privacy like we did on the last one i'm going to come down to backup and reset and you can see that that's under the personal section inside here I've got all these options and factory data reset tells me a little bit of a warning that says this is going to erase the internal storage that includes everything music photos downloads and all of your account settings now I'm not going to do this on my daily driver just letting you know this is Android jellybean 4.1 point2 so I'd go ahead and reset phone and that's how I do it over there let's take a look at Ice Cream Sandwich next so here we have the motorola droid razr HD from verizon this is the one that we've been reviewing for the last several days if we want to go ahead and reset this back we pull down the notification shade hit our little gear to get us into settings now this is ice cream sandwich and we have to scroll down again to privacy tap on that and we are going to now factory data reset all of thats already configured so let's go ahead and reset phone it says this is going to take about 10 minutes do we want to erase everything yes now I do not have an SD card in the phone but it does have an SD card slot will this erase that or not I wouldn't chancit pull the SD card out when you pull your sim out so that you're not going to be giving that information to someone else you might not have anything on the SD card but it's relatively easy to pull stuff off even after you've deleted it that's just the nature of SD storage this is Google's Nexus 7 tablet it is running a cyanogenmod nightly so it's the latest and greatest 4.1 point to build of jelly bean to to reset this we do the same thing we pull down our notification shade we hit settings and once we're in settings we find back and reset under the personal section from their factory data reset everything on the tablet and it's just as easy as that so as you can see resetting the data on your device and getting it ready for resale or giving to someone else isn't all that difficult though there are a few different ways to go about doing it depending on the device that you have in the operating system that it's running another item to note in addition to take out that SD card that's just a bonus tip for you but another item to note is a lot of times this is referred to as a factory reset and that's a little bit confusing because you're not restoring this to a factory image at all in fact if your device came with say Android version 4.1 point one and then you installed 4.1 point2 later on and then you did a factory reset it's going to reset it back to 4.1 point2 so it's not going all the way back to factory the same thing goes if you have cyanogenmod or AOKP or any other custom rum you're restoring it back to the factory version of that custom rom that also includes your custom recovery image as well so it's not factory factory fresh so if you're listing this on craigslist or your local classifieds you don't want to say it's factory you want to still say that it's running whatever custom rom it is unless you do want to do a factory reset in which case it's not a reset at all you've got to go out and you've got to find the original factory images for your device and then flash them all and of course do it QC to make sure everything's still working you didn't break something in the sess I wouldn't go that far I think a custom rom is a benefit it's an added benefit to your device but hey that's just me what do you think hopefully you feel a little bit more comfortable wiping your device and reselling it or giving it to someone else and giving your device new life whether that's your phone or your tablet whether it's stock or custom instead of just throwing it in a drawer letting it gather dust because after all that's what Android power users do instead of just keeping stuff all around myself excluded because I got to do videos like this we like to give our stuff back to the community and grow the Android power user base that's what this video series is really all about so did you like what you saw if so please give the video a big thumbs up if you've got any questions or comments head over to the article at pocketnow.com leave the comments down below so we can get back to you and so other people can learn from your questions and your answers for pocket now showing you how to reset your device I'm Joe Levi thanks for watching