Tips for buying a second-hand mobile phone

Here is a tip for buying a second-hand mobile phone

If you have plenty of extra money in your pocket, you can buy anything you like. However, it's wise to know that so many brand new cell phones or hardly used phones are cheaply thrown out or stolen and resold to a second hand store. Sometimes you should know that buying a second hand cell phone will save you a lot of money. Needless to say, there are some seemingly authentic dealers who turn out to be quite dishonest both about the age, the origin and the condition of the phone. Just to help everyone, here is a handy list of items to check when buying a second hand phone.

Firstly, check IMEI. The IMEI is a code that identifies each phone. No two phones have the same number and manufacturers use this number to verify stolen phones and the amount of warranty that your phone has. Check that the IMEI number on the phone corresponds to the number on the box and receipts. If the numbers differ, there could be several reasons. The first is that the phone is a stolen one or the phone had been sent for servicing and had the main board replaced. Both situations are warning signs of a problematic phone.

Secondly, examine the original receipt. Get a receipt from the seller. If it comes from a reputable retail outlet, then you do not have to worry much. The receipt will be able to tell you when the phone is bought and how much warranty is left. Phones usually have only 1 year warranty. However if you see a receipt that is of dubious origin, be very wary. The receipt might be faked to make the phone look younger than it actually is. It might even be from a second hand dealer trying to sell off the phone again.

Closely inspect the exterior. This step is rather simple and should give you an idea of how old the phone is. Wear and tear will occur. Usually this means the buttons' paint will peel off. For PDA phones, the paint near the Stylus slot will also peel off. Ensure that the condition is what you expect to pay for. Ratings by sellers are very subjective therefore when no photos are uploaded, buy only when satisfied of the condition.

Test the keypad. Press all the buttons many times. Phones should be able to withstand multiple presses without giving away.

Do a detailed check of the functions. After you are done with the exterior, it is time to check the phone itself. Try every function that the phone has. A laptop or another phone will come in handy at this time.

Is there scratches on the display? Check the LCD display. Dead pixels are rare in phones unlike LCD monitors. But for phones, try to see if there are scratches on the screen. Scratches are expensive to repair and most people should buy a lcd screen protector to ensure the high resale value of their phone.

Check moving parts. Some phones have sliders, flippers. Try them to test if they are flimsy. Moving parts tend to be easily damaged by drops and frequent use.

How long is battery life? Batteries drop in performance as they age. However even a second hand phone should not use more than 10% of its battery in the time you are testing. This point is hard to check and the best solution is to get a personal warranty from the seller so that you can test the battery life later.

One last thing. Is there a Warranty? Get the warranty card. See if it has been sent in. Some manufacturers will not honor their warranty if the card has not been sent in within a few days of purchase. Some brands will also have their users register their warranty online. Prior to meeting the seller, get the IMEI number and do a warranty check online. Also ask the seller for a 7 days personal warranty so that you have time to interact and ensure that the phone is in working condition.

This is unlikely to be an exhaustive list of what to check when buying a second hand phone. However, you stick to the tips above, it is difficult to get ripped off.

Lithium Battery Charger

Here's about Lithium battery charger

The technology behind the lithium battery is quite mind boggling to say the least, and its arrival has closed the gap between the normal alkaline batteries and of course, the high powered and highly unaffordable solutions you get on the market nowadays. In this modern world where we are swept up by the technological storm, we are quite dependent on a number of gadgets to make our lives that little bit more comfortable.

However, the question has always been about portability, and as our lives become more fluid and we transcend from one scene to another, we need to carry this gadgets around with us. Of course the problem is that most of the time, the rated battery time and reality often gets confused into conflicting expectations. More often than not, the gadgets that we depend on die on our hands, and with more advanced technology and more things being packed into a single solution, battery lives tend to get really short. The lithium battery has changed all of this and when it turned out in its rechargeable form, things were looking a lot better for the industry. If you have a handphone, and I suspect that you do, I would ascertain that the handphone you are using has within its shell a lithium battery which you have to power everyday. Previous incarnations of phones in times before was that some of them had alkaline batteries to power them or used underpowered batteries which did not last very long.

Of course this was in the earlier versions of phones all over the world, and the batteries that were old were also quite bulky, making slim design phones quite impossible when they first came out. Since the lithium battery came out, slim designs have been possible and because of this, a whole host of small and portable gadgets were able to come out of production - gadgets that had the staying power to last for quite a reasonable amount of time and had the option of being rechargeable. They pervaded the market of electronic and digital goods like music players, cameras, handphones, portable devices, PDA's etc - just to name a few.

There are many types of lithium battery chargers to go along with the devices that were just mentioned and they can come in all shapes and sizes. They can be attached to the car, it can be a simple plug in solution to a wall socket and it even can be a USB direct connect to the computer or to the laptop. So the options are pretty good when it comes to lithium battery chargers and when you think about it, and looking at the market, there is something for everyone. Just be wary of the prices, as they can range from product to product, and some chargers are actually not suited for the average user. Knowing what you want will really help you to make a purchasing decision as soon as possible.

Latest Sony Ericsson handphone

Check this out: latest Sony Ericsson handphone

The Sony Ericsson S312 is an entry-level phone that’s expected to be released in the second quarter of 2009. As usual with Sony Ericsson’s cheaper phones specification wise is not much to write home about however some users will be delighted to know that it does comes with Bluetooth which seems to be something that a lot of manufacturers tend not to have on their cheaper mobile phones.

In terms of other spec it comes with FM radio, a 2-inch TFT display, a speakerphone, and GSM/GPRS/EDGE/900/1800 connectivity. On the side of the phone if you will find a dedicated camera key for the two megapixel camera. One feature I like about Sony Ericsson phones is in the TrackID, which allows you to identify a music track by simply recording a small sample, this in turn then connects to a database which will return the name of the track and the artist.

The video below is a quick overview of what the phone looks like it’s only 36 seconds long so they do not cover any specifications. No pricing is yet available for the S312 but I’m sure this will be available in lots of markets on contract plans and pre-paid pay-as-you-go plans. We can see with the economic conditions worldwide that many cell phone manufacturers are bringing out more entry-level phones as demand rises.

facts about handphone

Here's my thought about handphone

A mobile phone or mobile (also called cellphone and handphone,^[1] as well as cell phone, cellular phone, cell, wireless phone, cellular telephone, mobile telephone or cell telephone) is a long-range, electronic device used for mobile voice or data communication over a network of specialized base stations known as cell sites. In addition to the standard voice function of a mobile phone, telephone, current mobile phones may support many additional services, and accessories, such as SMS for text messaging, email, packet switching for access to the Internet, gaming, Bluetooth, infrared, camera with video recorder and MMS for sending and receiving photos and video, MP3 player, radio and GPS. Most current mobile phones connect to a cellular network of base stations (cell sites), which is in turn interconnected to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) (the exception is satellite phones).

In 2008 there were 4,100 million mobile cellular subscriptions in the world.^[2] A mobile phone proper typically has a telephone keypad, more advanced devices have a separate key for each letter. Some mobile phones have a touchscreen.

History

A 1991 GSM mobile phone

In 1908, U.S. patent 887,357 for a wireless telephone was issued in to Nathan B. Stubblefield of Murray, Kentucky. He applied this patent to "cave radio" telephones and not directly to cellular telephony as the term is currently understood.^[3] Cells for mobile phone base stations were invented in 1947 by Bell Labs engineers at AT&T and further developed by Bell Labs during the 1960s. Radiophones have a long and varied history going back to Reginald Fessenden's invention and shore-to-ship demonstration of radio telephony, through the Second World War with military use of radio telephony links and civil services in the 1950s, while hand-held cellular radio devices have been available since 1973. A patent for the first wireless phone as we know today was issued in US Patent Number 3,449,750 to George Sweigert of Euclid, Ohio on June 10, 1969.

In 1945, the zero generation (0G) of mobile telephones was introduced. 0G mobile phones, such as Mobile Telephone Service, were not cellular, and so did not feature "handover" from one base station to the next and reuse of radio frequency channels.^{[citation needed]} Like other technologies of the time, it involved a single, powerful base station covering a wide area, and each telephone would effectively monopolize a channel over that whole area while in use. The concepts of frequency reuse and handoff as well, as a number of other concepts that formed the basis of modern cell phone technology are first described in U.S. patent 4,152,647 , issued May 1, 1979 to Charles A. Gladden and Martin H. Parelman, both of Las Vegas, Nevada and assigned by them to the United States Government.

This is the first embodiment of all the concepts that formed the basis of the next major step in mobile telephony, the Analog cellular telephone. Concepts covered in this patent (cited in at least 34 other patents) also were later extended to several satellite communication systems. Later updating of the cellular system to a digital system credits this patent.

Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive is widely considered to be the inventor of the first practical mobile phone for hand-held use in a non-vehicle setting. Cooper is the inventor named on "Radio telephone system" filed on October 17, 1973 with the US Patent Office and later issued as US Patent 3,906,166.^[4] Using a modern, if somewhat heavy portable handset, Cooper made the first call on a hand-held mobile phone on April 3, 1973 to a rival, Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.^[5]

The first commercial citywide cellular network was launched in Japan by NTT in 1979. Fully automatic cellular networks were first introduced in the early to mid 1980s (the 1G generation). The Nordic Mobile Telephone (NMT) system went online in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden in 1981.^[6]

Handsets

A Nokia phone with box.

A phone with touchscreen feature.

A printed circuit board inside a mobile phone

There are several categories of mobile phones, from basic phones to feature phones such as musicphones and cameraphones, to smartphones. The first smartphone was the Nokia 9000 Communicator in 1996 which incorporated PDA functionality to the basic mobile phone at the time. As miniaturisation and increased processing power of microchips has enabled ever more features to be added to phones, the concept of the smartphone has evolved, and what was a high-end smartphone five years ago, is a standard phone today. Several phone series have been introduced to address a given market segment, such as the RIM BlackBerry focusing on enterprise/corporate customer email needs; the SonyEricsson Walkman series of musicphones and Cybershot series of cameraphones; the Nokia N-Series of multimedia phones; and the Apple iPhone which provides full-featured web access and multimedia capabilities.

Features

Main articles: Mobile phone features, Smartphone, and iPhone

Mobile phones often have features beyond sending text messages and making voice calls, including call registers, GPS navigation, music (MP3) and video (MP4) playback, RDS radio receiver, alarms, memo and document recording, personal organiser and personal digital assistant functions, ability to watch streaming video or download video for later viewing, video calling, built-in cameras (3.2+ Mpx) and camcorders (video recording), with autofocus and flash, ringtones, games, PTT, memory card reader (SD), USB (2.0), infrared, Bluetooth (2.0) and WiFi connectivity, instant messaging, Internet e-mail and browsing and serving as a wireless modem for a PC, and soon will also serve as a console of sorts to online games and other high quality games.

Some phones includes touchscreen.

The total value of mobile data services exceeds the value of paid services on the Internet, and was worth 31 billion dollars in 2006 (source Informa).^{[citation needed]} The largest categories of mobile services are music, picture downloads, videogaming, adult entertainment, gambling, video/TV.

Nokia and the University of Cambridge are showing off a bendable cell phone called Morph.^[8]

Health risks

Main article: Mobile phone radiation and health

Because mobile phones emit electromagnetic radiation, concerns have been raised about cancer risks they may pose when used for long periods of time.^[18] So far studies have varied in their results and have proven inconclusive.^[19] However, health authorities have recommended holding the phone towards the head for only short periods or using hands-free/speakerphone technologies as precautions.^[20] Sir William Stewart, the head of the UK Government's Advisory Group on the issue advised that children under the age of 16 should only use phones in emergencies.^[21]