Do certified refurbished smartphones make for value proposition?

The prices of flagship phones have been going up each year. And, in the past few years, there have been some very capable flagship phones in the market. And everyone knows that with the launch of each new flagship, the prices of the previous year’s flagship falls. But the past few years have seen many older flagships exiting the market. When the recent flagships were launched, I reviewed a few of them and found that they were a good upgrade for people who had bought phones a couple of years or so ago.

Therefore, Samsung’s Galaxy S9 series was good for people upgrading from the S7 line; and the iPhone 8 certainly made sense for people upgrading from the iPhone 6s and the OnePlus 6 was a definite upgrade for anyone on the OnePlus 3T. That said, all these old phones are still very capable devices and could still give many mid-range handsets a run for its money.

Now if you’re in the market for a flagship, but don’t want to spend too much, yet want these older models, chances are you’d find only the iPhone 6s with some retailers. What if you still wanted these phones? Unboxed and refurbished phones make for a value proposition.

To help understand how good or bad these refurbished phones would turn out to be, I got in touch with popular platform Quikr, who were kind enough to loan these three phones for a week. Thus, I got hold of a rose gold iPhone 6s (Rs 25,454 for 64GB); a Samsung Galaxy S7 edge (Rs 27,800) and the OnePlus 3T (Rs 19,506). Now, one must understand that these were the prices at the time of the loan and they fluctuate depending on supply and demand. Thus prices now could be different. All three were Quikr-certified handsets, which essentially meant they had gone through 35-plus rigorous quality checks. Plus they also had a six-month warranty provided by Quikr.