What are the benefits and drawbacks of a refurbished phone?

When someone suggests you to buy a refurbished phone, what is the first question that comes in your mind? The question may vary from; what is a refurbished phone? What are the benefits of buying one? Or what are the drawback of the refurbished phone. This article will give you the answers to all these questions.

What is a refurbished phone?

The word refurbished means “repaired” or “renewed”. From this we get an idea that refurbished phones are the used phones that had been repaired once sold by the owners and are again available for sale in the market after their renovation; without any scratch or software issues. These phones are available in the market and online. Many websites in UK are selling these refurbished phones with amazing discounts and deals.

Now we know what a Refurbished phone is, now let’s see the benefits and drawbacks of these phones.

Benefits of buying a refurbished phones:

There are many benefits of buying one, some of the benefits are described in detail below:

1.      Cost:

Refurbished phones are always less costly than a new phone. This means that buying a refurbished phone saves your money. Buying a phone can be an exhausting task as you have a limited budget and you want to use your hard earned money wisely. So you always look for the best phone that fulfils your needs in the scarce recourses. Keeping in mind this scenario, most of the times the phones with your desired specification tend to go out of your budget. In such cases, we suggest you to buy a refurbished phone, so you can have your desired specifications within your budget. As the refurbished phones are much cheaper in cost than the same new phone.

2.      Eco-friendly Option:

Yes, you read that right! Refurbished phones are surprisingly “environment friendly” devices that you can buy to save the environment. Now you must be wondering, how can you save the environment by buying a refurbished phone? The answer to this question is that refurbished phones are the recycled phones, when Mobile Phone upgrade their existing phone, instead of throwing these phone in garbage, they sell their old phone (defected or not) to the refurbishing websites or vendors. These vendors then repair these phones, make them scratch less and bug free and then sell these phones in low rates and on special discounts.

So if we don’t have such refurbishing options for our mobile phones and if we dump our old phones in trash, these thrown away devices can cause serious issue to our environment from unnecessary explosions to dangerous chemicals emission.

3.      Warranty:

Usually the good and well reputed refurbishing firms offer 3 months to 1 year warranty on the refurbished phones. It means that if you buy refurbished phone, you don’t have worry about spending more money on its further repair. On the other hand if you buy a used second hand phone directly from the owner of a mobile phone, you might have to spend more money on its repair if any problem arises in the smart phone. So, buying a refurbished phone doesn’t only saves your money in the first place but also saves your money if you face any problem with your smart phone after you have purchased it. So it’s a win-win situation for you!

Drawbacks of buying refurbished phones:

While there are many benefits of buying a refurbished phone, contrary to that there are many drawbacks of this act as well. Some of them are described below:

1.      The Wait:

Waiting is the most difficult thing for many people around the world, and for buying a refurbished phone you would have to tolerate this difficulty. These days almost everyone wants to get the latest mobile phone in the market, but that cannot be done if you are looking forward to buy a refurbished phone. For example, if you want to buy a refurbished iPhone XS, you cannot get that right now, you would have to wait that Apple launches the next model of iPhone and then you should wait for the owners of iPhone XS to sell their phone to the refurbishing companies. You can buy these refurbished phones only then when they refurbish the iPhone XS and put it on for sale. Yes, that take a lot of time!

2.      Short Warranty:

So back in the “benefits” part of this article, we were all happy about the warranty that the refurbishing companies offer on the refurbished smartphones, but there is also a drawback regarding the warranty part. Mostly the refurbishing companies give short warranties on these refurbished smartphones, by that we mean that the warranty is only for a short period of time. Contrary to this you can avail long warranties if you buy a new smartphone.

3.      Grade of Refurbishment:

It’s not always guaranteed that you would get the perfectly repaired refurbished smartphone from the refurbishment companies. It might happen that the refurbished phone that you buy still has the bugs in its software or it still has the scratches on its body or both. This is dependent on the grade of refurbishment, if you buy a “Grade A” refurbished phone then there would be very little or no chances that you would get a faulty piece, but if you buy a lesser Grade refurbished phone then these chances might increase.

So, after going through the article, we hope that you are now ready to make a decision to buy a refurbished phone or not. Every refurbished phone has its pros and cons but we should buy these phones if we want an amazing and reliable phone while staying in the limit of our budget, and also if we want to save our environment! But if you are a Smartphone Lover/freak, then buying a refurbished phone is not for you as you won’t get the latest model if you go for a refurbished phone.