With mobile phones, physical acquisition is usually the best option, and logical acquisition is the second-best option. Manual extraction should be the last option when performing the forensic acquisition of a mobile phone. Both logical and manual acquisition can be used to validate findings in the physical data. During manual acquisition, the examiner utilizes the user interface to investigate the contents of the phone's memory. The device is used normally through keypad or touchscreen and menu navigation, and the examiner takes pictures of each screen's contents. Manual extraction introduces a greater degree of risk in the form of human error, and there is a chance of deleting evidence. Manual acquisition is easy to perform and only acquires the data that appears on a mobile phone.

Next, let's look at the amount of information that can be extracted from mobile phones.