I keep cell phones until they’re obsolete or until they break. However, when I shop for a cell phone, there are a substantial number that are refurbished or “certified pre-owned”. I find this even for phones that have been on the market for less than one year. Why are there so many used phones? Where do they come from? Are they reliable at all or am I buying someone else’s problem?
Some are phones returned to the manufacturer under warranty. They are checked and sometimes there’s nothing wrong.
The stores usually take returns with few questions. They just ship them off to the manufacturer for a credit.
Best Buy is offering Motorola X Pure refurbs for $214. They are $299 new.
Phones are unique because they can be easily factory reset.
Ensuring the refurb you buy is a stock phone and virus free. You can find used phones at many small phone repair shops. Trade ins. They physically cleaned and factory reset.
I have wondered if a factory reset completely wipes the entire drive. It should. But I haven’t been able to confirm that
Trac-Fone sent me two Andriods for free. Both are “refurbished”, I’m sure.
Can’t figure out how to do anything with them except take dog pictures.
Some of the refurbished phones came from me. I like having a new-ish phone.
I bought an iPhone 5se (the smallest iPhone). From the start I realized going small was a mistake. I traded it for a 6 plus (the biggest iPhone). I love the 6plus, but if the next iteration has any cool features, I’ll probably trade again.
I could get a bit more selling my phones, but the ~$100 I get from Verizon is quick and easy. They send me supplies for sending them my old phone, along with detailed instructions.
Gatopescado, the procedure for taking cat pictures is almost identical to that for dog pictures. I’ve never tried it with a fisher cat specifically, but I can’t imagine that’s too different, either.
And really, once you’ve got cat pictures, what more do you need?
Excuse me? Obviously you haven’t seen all of the pictures I have on my phone of my grandkids…
It may not.
(Auto-play video warning)
what about dog movies?!?!
Ooh, I can’t help you with that, sevenwood. I’ve never managed to take any pictures of my grandkids with mine.
As the OP, let me refine my original post:
I’m not just talking about refurbished phones on eBay or other places that sell used merchandise. When I go on Amazon or Best Buy’s website, they feature refurbished phones. Are these phones returned by customers and refurbished in-house, or do they buy refurbished phones directly from wholesalers?
Returns, repossessed, Early trade-ins, open box jobs sometimes, Sometimes they warranty service a phone by just swapping it out, then fix the original and sell it again as refurbished
I worked in a shop that reburbished phones for Cricket. While I can’t say for sure why the phones ended up in our shop on the whole, it was clear that there were a lot of different possible reasons. I suspect many of them were brand new, and simply returned after being used for a day, the buyer not wanting it any more. You couldn’t sell that phone as new as long as it was out of the box and had left the store, so you sent it back to our shop to make sure that it was still like-new (and perhaps with updated software) when given out as a replacement for someone making a return.
Every possible thing you might imagine that could go wrong with the phone was present at least in a very small percentage. Microphones don’t work, speakers don’t work, touch screen isn’t accurate, wi-fi or bluetooth doesn’t work, etc. Certainly some problems were more common on some phone models than others. Given just how many cell phones there are out there and the abuse that people put them through, there’s going to be a significant number that end up in the shop as being no longer useful to its previous owner that only need a very small amount of work needed to get them to be practically new again. Sure, there were plenty that were Beyond Economical Repair, but it wasn’t all that high of a percentage.
I don’t know of how many shops like ours Cricket has or had, but IIRC we shipped out about 2000 phones a day. The company was completely separate from Cricket, although reps obviously visited from time to time, but I don’t know how the economics worked in terms of who owned the phones while we worked on them; all I know is that plant manager wanted a certain number of each phone shipped each day we shipped (and those numbers always changed).