Dig out your old mobile phones - it could be worth a fortune

It’s staggering to think how much mobile phone designs have changed over the last decade. You probably remember tiny screens, flip phones, clunky buttons and the need to delete your messages every five minutes because the memory was too full. And now they’re all out of fashion, and we all seem to be craving the latest smartphones like the new iPhone or Samsung Galaxy.

But if you’re planning a tidy up between now and Christmas, dig out those old phones you may have packed away or just thrown in a drawer. Some older phones are fetching around £50 or even hundreds of pounds with collectors – read on to see which are the most valuable.

What’s it worth?

Some popular older mobile phones are now being bought and sold for good money. But despite this, a Talkmobile survey has found that even though over half of us have at least one mobile phone lying around the house, only a fraction of us would sell it on. In fact, most of us who find an old phone in the drawer are likely to ignore it and forget about it.

With Christmas almost upon us and almost a quarter of us planning to buy gadgets as gifts, you could benefit from selling your old handset for extra cash. Like most collectible items, the rarer mobiles in a better condition will fetch more money. And even when it’s not an antique, relatively new phones can still pocket you some extra cash, as long as they’re in a decent condition. Here’s a list of phones and what they’re going for on eBay according to the Talkmobile research.

• Motorola DynaTAC 8000, £1,000.
• Nokia 3310, £10-£55.
• First ever Nokia Mobira Talkman 1981, £900.
• Apple iPhone 2G, £150-£1,000.
• Motorola StarTAC, £30-£100.
• Motorola Razr V3, £15-£60; Dolce & Gabanna model,£150.
• Sony Ericsson W880i, £30-£50.
• Nokia N95, £60-£90.
• HTC One, £40-£50.
• Nokia 9000 Communicator, £20-£50.

If you plan to buy the latest model as soon as it’s released, you might be able to cover a chunk of the cost by selling your recent smartphone handset too. An iPhone 6 will fetch £386 while a Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge Plus 64GB will get you £255 on musicMagpie.

If you choose to buy a new handset outright, selling your old one is a great way of putting some money towards it. It also means you can avoid expensive contracts that include paying the cost of a handset, and take advantage of a sim only deal.