Gadgetory

hey guys it's joe from pocketnow.com and i thought you might be interested to know this since we do a lot of reviews and have a lot of review units that we come in and do we don't want to send these devices back with all of our personal information on it so today's Android quick tip is how do you do a factory reset on your Android powered device let's go take a look all right so this is the HTC Desire HD which was graciously provided to us to review by clove technologies out of the UK we'll give you a link in the article I'm about to send this device grudgingly back to them but before I do that I need to wipe out everything now here's how you do that you go to your home screen and you go to menu and settings and then all the way down here in you might think it's under security you might think it's under privacy no generally speaking it's under SD and phone storage you tap that and right there you've got factory data reset touch that it tells you everything that it will do and more importantly what it won't do this is not going to delete any files on your SD card your music your photos temporary stuff apps that you've installed there nothing so your SD card is still going to have personal information on it you will want to delete all of that manually and I would highly recommend that you do that in a desktop or laptop computer the current system software and bubble of applications will will still be there so it goes back to the stock image but it is going to get rid of your Google and other accounts and then any apps that you have installed to internal storage so we'll go ahead and reset the phone and here's the process that does double check make sure you want to erase everything what should we do and we get this little reboot indicator now that's kind of telling the way that it does a factory reset is by rebooting the phone into a modified recovery and it goes through and wipes all of the partitions and restores everything in that process how secure is that I don't know if you are working for some secret government agency and want to make sure that all of your confidential and top-secret information is cleared off the device you'll probably want to talk with your security personnel to make sure that this is secure enough and they are likely going to tell you that you need to run this through some kind of an industrial grinder to completely pulverize the device to make sure it is all secure but I don't know we'll let our FBI CIA NSA and the other secret agency individuals respond to that in the comments below so please do that come obviously if you like this kind of video and like Android quick tips give us a thumbs up subscribe to our video channel and I know I normally say all of that at the end of my videos but I figured I'd fill some time here because as you can see we are waiting on the erasure to happen and this usually takes about the same amount of time that it takes to flash a ROM which can see here just completed now a lot of times the phone will automatically restart a lot of times it won't in this case it did it's going to depend on your device whether they tell you to automatically reboot after you've done a reset or not in this case it is automatically booting back up and I should be met with the initial boot sequence but you can see here I am now this is just the first step next step that you've got to do is obviously format all of your information off that SD card and not that is not going to be entirely secure so I would recommend if you're selling your device take out the SD card don't hand that off to somebody else in this case since it's going back to close technologies I've gone ahead and erased everything that I've put on the SD card so it's all nice and and clean for them when they get it back there's one other thing to do that you might overlook and we'll get to that as soon as this boots up all the way so the device is booted up I'm going to go ahead and unlock it and again we're still met with the first boot experience once we've done that we're just going to power down the device and I'll show you the next step all right now we're met with our language selector I am just going to hold the power button press and hold and it asks me if I want to power off which I do go ahead and touch that and it will shut down wait for these lights to turn off and you should be good now this is the part people forget take off your compartment take out your SD card now I'm gonna leave this in like I said but normally you would keep that with you but make sure you take out your SIM your sim is your phone take that out and keep it for your next phone because you can't make phone calls without it and vice versa anyone else who has your SIM card can make phone calls send texts and whatnot as if they were you now putting this back on we put pressure here and snap it back together now we're not done what I have done is I have kept all of the packing material and you can't see that very well that is a little battery cover so what I'm gonna do is take this off this is fully charged which I always recommend you do somebody sends you something or if you're selling it make sure you send home a fully charged battery it's just polite the way you make sure it doesn't discharge is you put it back in its sleeve so that's what I have done here just put the sleeve over it's got this nice little tab and what I'm gonna do now is just slip the battery back in place this is the way that it came and of course I keep all of my packing material getting this back in may be a little bit tricky just go ahead and monkey around with it just a little bit and after some monkeying off-camera I've got it all in place we'll just slide it in just like that and we will replace the cover which I will do the right way instead of upside down now this is the HTC Desire HD and it is a little bit complicated to get this in and closed and you just have to futz with it for a while tip that side in first that's usually the best way to do it but it is a pain in the neck to to get it closed which is I've said it before I'll say it again that's actually a good thing because once you do that it's gonna stay nice and tight so there you go now I've got fingerprints all over this screen I'm gonna take my soft cloth I'm gonna clean it off really quick and I'll do that off-camera once you've done that in this case it came with this nice little protective sleeve that goes over the front and we'll just wrap that around put it all together and we've put everything back in the box organized it as neatly as we can making sure we're not forgetting anything we've got the power adapter we've got the prongs USB we've got the headphones we've got all the material that came with it now why do we include all that stuff well I wouldn't include the headphones if I were sending it to someone else if I've used them because that's got my earwax on it and I don't want them to have to experience my earwax but you want them to have the best unboxing experience that they can and we just slide it back together and there you go it looks like brand-new it's great you can now sell this on eBay give it to a friend or whatnot or in this case we're going to return it back to close out there in the United Kingdom again with a big thanks out to them so that's how you want to go ahead and return or prep your device for selling or for returning to where you got it from or whatever factory resetting removing the SD card and repackaging it one of those things that you may not do all that often but if you're moving up from say this device to the next device or like I did with my g1 up to my g2 you want to make sure that the person who's receiving this has the best experience that they can and a little bit of work goes a long way and keeps your data nice and safe and it's better than accidentally embarrassingly including your SD card and your micro sim or your regular sim and then having to ask for it back so just make sure you do that so neat little Android quick tip for you for today if you like this kind of stuff give it a thumbs up I already mentioned that but of course subscribe to our video channel head on over to pocketnow.com and check out some of our articles and for pocketnow.com I am Joe Levi