Important things to check before buying any second-hand phone



Today, most people prefer buying a second hand or refurbished phone. Why?, we may say some go for second hand phone because of cheap to afford. What people today didn’t realize about second hand phones is that most of the second hand phones are sold because of some problems noted by the first owner of the phone. 


Some phones undergo flashing, rooting, or even hardware failure which makes the owner to give up on it. Most of the phone sellers are not aware of those mention problems till it landed to the end user. Here are the most important things to note before buying any second hand phone.


1. Battery Life


Before buying any second hand advisably it should undergo some battery checks, for IOS users this will be easy since IPhones has feature called Battery Health, this feature provides the battery health of the phone which ranges between 0% to 100%. But for android users this maybe little difficult to determine the battery health without undergoing some tests, but there is a little tips for this. 


Firstly, make sure the phone has some charge at least 40%, after this navigate to phone settings and open GPS, Mobile data connection and play some music or videos for some time (Recommended 30 minutes). If you find that the battery percentage is not dropping fast, then that means the battery might be good. 


Also check for the charging speed to make sure that the battery does not require much time to get full.


2. Third Party Apps


This may sound weird, but it worth. Before buying any second hand phone it is important to check for some third party apps, here I doesn’t mean any third party app, but specifically there are some phones that are not fully bought from the seller, these phones are normally called loan phones, as the name suggest you might think of getting the phone without paying the money at first or completely not paying the money till later times. 


These phone sellers companies here in Nigeria are Easybuy, Nowlater, Spredda, CDcare and many more. 


These phones has some inbuilt security apps that is backed to the hardware component of the phone which serve as a barrier to those that bought the phone without paying the complete money, so as to lock the phone when one does not pay the money at a particular time. 


Most people don’t know this, because some peoples has desire to buy phone directly without checking everything. So, for you to avoid this, follow these steps. Navigate to the phone settings then open Apps or App Management, check for “system apps” option, right there you will find any third party apps that has full authority to lock your phone. 


Note that, most of these apps has no names, that means it has only icon, to confirm this, try to uninstall the app, if it uninstalled then it is not a third party app but if you can’t uninstall it, that means it is third party app, and right you found this then it is a time to make choice to buy it or not. 


The reason why I bring this is that, the problem doesn’t arises till later times, by then maybe the first owner of the phone is not available or is far away from you.


3. Performance

The performance here means anything that makes the phone to function smoothly without any problem.


Before buying second hand phone make sure you check the RAM of the phone because the RAM determine the speed of the phone, also check the phone storage for reserving more important documents and most important the phone durability, because some phones are not durable at all in view of the fact that the first owner of the phone has finished the phone to the extent that it has no longer performance, you might found the phone has some overheating problem or lagging problem or even app crashing problem, so to avoid these you have to check for the phone performance.


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