New way to get rid of the old
Want to retire your old iPhone? This machine will buy it from you
BEEN THINKING about swapping out your old iPhone for a spiffy new iPhone 5C or 5S, both going on sale today?
You can trade the vintage mobile for a newbie at Walmart, Target or Apple's own retail stores.
You can get cash or store credit at GameStop or Best Buy - with no requirement to buy another phone.
You can nab a "gift card" credit at Amazon.com, or get cash from buying sites like Gazelle and Nextworth.
Or, you can saunter into a nearby mall and deposit the phone into an ecoATM machine. This cool-operating, automated appraiser then does an inspection, quotes a buy-back price and, if you agree, swallows the phone and spits out the moolah.
Juicy resale values: However you trade in or trade up, the good news is that a two-year-old Apple 4S just coming off contract (if you bought it at introduction) is still worth a goodly amount on the trade-in market - more than needed to pay the upfront $99 price for a basic 5c (essentially a plastic re-clad iPhone 5), maybe even enough for a more seriously tweaked $199 and up 5S (see sidebar.)
There's serious demand in Europe and Asia for our used phones - especially the GSM phones that AT&T and T-Mobile offer here. And domestic buyers of "unlocked" used phones appreciate the more economical, month-to-month plans they can sign up for from the likes of MetroPCS (with the mere swap-out of the SIM card on a GSM model.)
In scoping out the value of an AT&T-branded 32GB iPhone 4S in "good" or "like new" condition, I pulled up bids of $150 to $235. The most generous were for store credit at GameStop and Amazon, with Best Buy off the top mark by just a couple of bucks.
For comparision, the top quote I could find for a comparably aged Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone was $165.
And current values on other once-noteworthy phones could take your breath away - in the worst way. Amazon offers "up to $1" for an HTC Droid Incredible. Some recent BlackBerry models fetch just $35.
It's a noble thing: Trading in a mobile phone is about a lot more than making money, suggested Ryan Kider, director of marketing and communications for ecoATM. As their brand name suggests, "We first got into this for environmental reasons. Only about 11 percent of the 300 million-plus old phones now sitting in people's drawers will likely be recycled. Every one we can put back to work is one less phone that has to be made. And if [they are] nonfunctional, we can still reclaim the precious metals inside."
Which explains why the National Science Foundation gave ecoATM a grant to help develop its multi-step system, starting with live agents at HQ remotely verifying a seller's identity. A robotic visual scanning of the phone's exterior is next, followed by electronic testing of the innards and finally safe robotic handling of the device after you've agreed to the purchase price.
To run the whole process in five minutes, Kider recommends that you charge a phone before bringing it to an ecoATM inspection, "though we have free charging stations on the side of each terminal." Before letting an old phone go to any buyer, it's wise to "wipe" the memory, accomplished in settings.
A buyer of used tablets and MP3 music players, too, ecoATM has been doing so well in the Philadelphia market that the company's had to install second terminals in several high traffic locations - the Granite Run Mall, Franklin Mills, Neshaminy Mall amd Oxford Valley Mall. For more details, visit ecoATM.com.
Blog: philly.com/gizmoguy
Online: ph.ly/Tech