With Google Play available in the Android smartphone, very few people keep themselves from installing and trying out new apps and games everyday. But this can make your Android device a little slower over time. This the because some of these apps leave some garbage and user data stored inside your phone and some of the apps always keep running in the background. After a few months, things go so bad that you start wishing if you could start over once again. Fortunately Android allows you to do just that through its factory reset feature. You can factory reset your Android smartphone/tablet to bring it back in the same state as it were when you first bought it.
If you want to factory reset your Android device, you should first backup your settings and other data using a tool like Titanium Backup. Without first backing up your data, if you choose to perform a factory reset, then you will lose all your data including the user apps and the system data.
After creating a backup of your phone data, you can proceed to perform a factory reset using the following instructions:
- Open the System preferences in Android. You can open it by going to the home screen, tapping on the menu key (the left of the three buttons on your Android device) and then selecting System Settings from the menu that appears.
- In the System settings screen, you will all the preferences for Android organized under several categories. You have to select Backup & reset under the Personal category.
- On the Backup & reset screen, you can optionally choose to backup some of your data to Google servers to your Google account. You have to select Factory data reset under the Personal data category.
- You will be shown a warning about what the factory reset is going to do. Basically it will remove the Google account from Android smartphone, erase downloaded apps and the settings that you have made to the apps and the system. You can tap on the Reset phone button to proceed.
- This will erase all the data from the phone storage (all the data on any external SD cards would not be erased). After a few minutes, your phone will be restarted and you would see the usual screen for setting up Android and adding a Google account.