second hand iphones..

CyberJuice

hello guys

im going to buy a second hand iphone and im wondering what things should i look out for when purchasing one??.. i have never used one of these phones before so ive no idea about them, i see people talking about jailbroken ect

is it safe to use a jailbroken phone?does it affect my ability to download apps or to hook my phone up to my pc and put songs onto it??

also is the 3g worth gettin?i see this is the cheapest type of one available so im curious if there is any point in gettin this one or if it is not a good phone. i just need music, apps,wifi,camera and video record..

yoyo

Moved to Apple Media Devices

padraig_f

Not sure there's a lot of value in buying iPhones second hand, people don't sell them that cheaply and Apple stop supporting them with newer versions of iOS (I think the 3G and below are unsupported on the current iOS 5). I have a 3GS and it's still a good phone but just not sure I'd be paying a couple of hundred for it second-hand.

Apart from cosmetic stuff, a drawback with buying 2nd-hand iPhones is that the battery life deteriorates with age. So I'd check this. You can check it under Settings->General->Usage.

Mine currently says:
Usage: 5 hours, 34 mins
Standby: 1 Day, 3 Hours
and battery percentage is at 19%, so it's due a charge soon.

Checking that will give you an idea of how often you'll need to charge the phone.

But when you combine the reduced battery life and the inability to run newer versions of iOS, I'm not sure buying second-hand represents great value for money.

CyberJuice

thanks for the reply padraig. i would pay no more than 120 ish for a 3g as it seems they range from 120 - 250 depending on age..120 is a good price??


i would probably only want the phone for 1 year then after that time if i like it i would buy a brand new updated version of one,so hopefully a second hand phone would last 1 year???

regarding jailbrokenm,does this bring any risks to the phone?am i better off buying jailbroken or unjailbroken?

Barty

If you have the money it may be better to buy a 3Gs rather than a 3G - the 3G has been around for about 3.5 years whereas the 3Gs was launched a year later - you could pick up a 3Gs for ~€40 to €50 more than a 3G - as Padraig mentioned Apple stop supporting older models with s/w updates, however the latest version of software is supported on the 3Gs.
As for jailbreaking it's not important, what is more critical is if the phone is locked to a network or if it is factory unlocked - a factory unlocked phone will cost more as it can be used on any network.

padraig_f

CyberJuice wrote: »

thanks for the reply padraig. i would pay no more than 120 ish for a 3g as it seems they range from 120 - 250 depending on age..120 is a good price??


i would probably only want the phone for 1 year then after that time if i like it i would buy a brand new updated version of one,so hopefully a second hand phone would last 1 year???

regarding jailbrokenm,does this bring any risks to the phone?am i better off buying jailbroken or unjailbroken?

Yeah if you get it for around €120 and don't have great expectations of it being supported long-term, then it may be worth getting. Also, in a year's time the iPhone 5 will probably be out, and the current 4S will probably be €100 cheaper, so yeah at that price, you don't have much to lose. Note that the 3GS runs iOS5 but the 3G doesn't, so a 3GS would be preferable.

Whether it's jailbroken or not doesn't make a big difference. Jailbreaking is a purely software operation, so you can just do a factory restore on a jailbroken phone and revert to the un-jailbroken OS.

The only advantage to having it jailbroken is the ability to run unauthorised apps, and to be frank, pirated apps. You can do this afterwards yourself if you want with a bit of research, so having it jailbroken doesn't really add or take much from the value.

I jailbroke mine before but found it wasn't worth the hassle (e.g. can't upgrade to latest OS without un-jailbreaking it), so reverted to the non-jailbroken version. I'm not that up-to-date on the jailbreaking scene, but my impression was with recent improvements to iOS there was less-and-less reason to do it (e.g. one reason to jailbreak earlier OS versions was to add multi-tasking, but multi-tasking was added by Apple in iOS4)

guil

3G has no multi-tasking with iOS 4. i'm not sure but does it record video, if it does i doubt its any good cos the 3GS video wasn't anything remarkable if iirc

blankblank

3G has no native video recording app,,, the only means around this is a jailbreak and download of "cy-corder" through cydia,,,, and even at that the video is awful

CyberJuice

thanks for the replies guys

can i record good video with the 3gs?