We advertise that we’ll buy an iPhone 4 for up to $200, and an iPhone 4S for up to $300. But, you ask, what’s the fine print on that deal? It probably won’t come as a surprise that it’s the phones that were most expensive new that are worth the most used, so here are the details:

 iPhone 4  - Mint/New Condition

AT&T

32 GB Memory

$200

Of course, to have a mint phone, it means that it’s been barely used or never used, and 90% of the phones we receive are actually in “good” condition, showing superficial wear, but with no dents or deep scratches, and in full-working order. And most phones are on the lower end of the scale as far as memory goes. If you have a phone in that condition, you’re more likely to see priced like this:

 iPhone 4  - Good ConditionAT&T

8 GB Memory

$165

 

 iPhone 4S - Good Condition

AT&T

64 GB Memory

$255

 

 So you’ll see that the top end phones are fetching a resale price about $40-45 above the entry level phones. The best way to find out how much your phone is worth is to visit Mobixa.com and get a quote.

A SIM card is a small microchip embedded into a plastic card, and phones using the GSM standard, such as those on the AT&T and T-Mobile networks use these cards to identify phones on their networks. The phone number and the identifying information that validates your phone handset on the network are stored on the card, and there’s a small amount of memory on a SIM card that can also be used to store some phone numbers and other personal data. A SIM card is a lot like a memory card. As smartphones have become more sophisticated, SIM cards have become smaller, to make more room for circuitry. The iPhone 5 uses the newest SIM, the Nano-SIM.

You can have SIMs for two different accounts, and you can swap them in one phone to be able to place and receive calls on either account. Some phones even support two SIMs at once, though they’re specialty phones that you’re not likely to find at your local AT&T store.

When you buy a phone with a subsidy from a carrier (for example, if you buy an iPhone for $199, it’s actually a $600+ phone, but you’re getting a discount for signing a contract) the phone is “locked” so it will only accept a SIM from that carrier. That’s why you can’t take your AT&T phone and put a T-Mobile SIM in it. Often, after your contract is up, your carrier will be willing to give you a code to “unlock” the phone so it can be used with any SIM.

An ESN is an “Electronic Serial Number” which is used by CDMA carriers (Verizon and Sprint in the US) to identify the owner of a phone. GSM carriers like AT&T and T-Mobile use an entirely different method, with a removable SIM card to identify the phone on the network, but CDMA phones don’t have a SIM. If the owner of a CDMA phone doesn’t leave their account in good standing, the carrier will flag their ESN as “bad” and that phone will not be able to be enrolled with that carrier again, even for a new owner.

Some of the circumstances that will result in a phone having a bad ESN are:

• The subscriber didn’t pay their final bill
• The subscriber switched carriers and didn’t pay an early termination fee
• The subscriber stopped using the phone service without formally terminating the service contract with the carrier
• The phone was reported lost or stolen to the carrier

Because a phone with a bad ESN can’t be re-enrolled on its carrier, it’s not worth as much as a phone that was terminated in good-standing. If you turn in a phone to Mobixa with a bad ESN, the good news is that we can still buy it from you. We will, however, deduct a $25 “Bad ESN fee.” If you are uncertain whether your phone’s ESN is good, we’d recommend calling your carrier before sending it to Mobixa to make sure your account is in good standing.

So what can a bad ESN phone be used for? All of the parts on the phone except the logic board can be used, so many people will use a bad ESN phone for parts. It’s also sometimes possible to resurrect a bad ESN phone by contacting the carrier and paying off any remaining balance.

Please contact us if you have any questions about your phone’s ESN.

I’ve said many times that it’s easier (and cheaper) today to get a technology-based startup company off the ground than it ever has been before. While Mobixa isn’t a startup company, strictly speaking, as it’s a new business unit of an established company, it’s been run like a startup. And we’ve taken advantage of a lot of products and services that have made it much easier to get the site up and running. I wanted to provide an overview and review of some of the tools we’ve used.

Appsumo:  this is a Groupon-like deals site for apps and startup-related services. We signed up for a few promotions, such as the “Lean Startup Bundle” and the “2012 Lean SX Bundle” which offered good deals on a lot of products and services that ended up being useful, and others that were just interesting to find out about.

Olark:  A real-time chat tool that lets Mobixa users chat with us if they have questions.

Zendesk: A powerful support platform that makes it easier for our support staff to keep track of all the questions and support requests coming in.

Zippykid: Hosting WordPress can be hard. Zippykid is affordable and pain-free WordPress hosting.

Sanebox: This tool “reads” my email and separates out the real email from all of the notifications and offers and receipts and newsletters that aren’t spam but clutter up my inbox anyway.  I went from getting 200 emails a day down to more like 15-20.

Ruby on Rails: A powerful development framework that powers the Mobixa website.

Mailchimp: This tool does the heavy lifting for our notifications and newsletters. The best part is that for small businesses, it’s free until you surpass 10,000 emails per month.

Orchestra: A powerful collaborative to-do app. This lets the different members of the staff keep a list of things they need to do, while others can monitor that list, and we can even assign items to each other.

Toggl: A useful tool for keeping track of time spent on different projects. Great for contractors.

Google Voice: It let us find a cool phone number for Mobixa, and helps us by transcribing voicemails when we miss the call.

There will be many more cool apps, and I’ll follow up this blog post with another one once I’ve tried out more things.