Pretty sweet news out of Verizon today…They’ve launched a trade-in program for your old phone! If you’re one of the many people who bought an awesome new smartphone using your upgrade discount, only to become frustruated when a new phone came out 6 months later with the one big feature you’ve been waiting for, Verizon feels your pain, and is trying to help minimize it!
Head over to your local store or to trade-in.vzw.com and notice that Verizon will now give you a gift card for a certain value if you trade in your old smartphone toward a new one. While this is not quite the same as getting cash, or a straight up discount on your new phone, it can certainly help soften the blow of a new phone. Verizon’s main goal here is two-fold. First, they do want to get you to renew your contract, but generally most people do that most of the time anyway. The second goal Verizon has for this program is to entice people to switch carriers. This is a pretty smart move, given people’s general reluctance to do so.
The biggest flaw in the program though is in the way it values phones. First, let’s not forget that these are all phones that people have generally paid between $99 and $299 for. While some phones you can get a pretty good deal on (the Droid Eris, for instance, can be bought for $99 or less with certain deals, and Verizon Wireless will give you a trade-in value of up to $132,) others would be better sold on eBay. If you’re thinking of switching, the deal may be even sweeter. For a 32GB iPhone 4 you can get $212. Not a bad deal for a safe and secure way to sell your phone, even though you can almost certainly get more for it on eBay than that, some people just aren’t comfortable selling the phone themselves to a 3rd party buyer.
While this is nothing Earth-shattering, its definitely nice to have another outlet for selling your phone, especially one that is so easy to use and safe. While you may lose a bit of convenience with the gift card, you can also make some decent money back on a new phone, and if you’re really good, you just might be able to use it as another bargaining chip when haggling for the best price on your new phone and accessories!
Would you consider trading your smartphone in toward your next one? I know I like to hang on to at least one phone in case of emergency…Do you normally just sell your old phone? How do you usually do it? And is Verizon really trying to rip us off by giving us less than the phones are really worth? Tell us below!
Sources: Verizon, Droid-Life
We told you last week that Verizon was going to start carrying Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 in July, and it looks like we’ve got even more news coming your way regarding the iPad 2′s big competitor.
So we basically got a blizzard of phone release date announcements in the past week, and surprise, surprise, they’ll all be up for sale at Verizon Wireless stores nation wide at the same time next week. While we knew these phones were coming some time this spring or summer, none had official release dates until now, and we certainly didn’t expect them to release those dates so near to the actual day the phones will be up for sale.
