When you are dealing with pre-owned goods of any kind, there is always going to be an extra factor that doesn’t apply to brand new products – wear and tear. The signs of ‘love’ a second-hand item displays affect its appeal to a prospective new owner, and perhaps its performance and expected lifespan, too.
Consequently, dealers in used goods have to account for wear and tear in their pricing.
At Phoenix Cellular, we use a grading system for our used mobile phone handsets to help make our pricing transparent and easy to understand. We have four ratings – Grade A Pristine, Grade A/B, Grade B and Grade C.
In this blog, we will take a closer look at what we mean by Grade B used mobile phones.
Cosmetic wear and tear
First of all, any signs of wear and tear our second hand mobiles display are cosmetic only. Every handset we sell undergoes a 20-point test to ensure its electronics are in good working order, covering things like the responsiveness of the touchscreen, WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity, microphone and speaker performance, SIM slot touch points and so on.
Overall, we define a Grade B mobile as a high-quality handset that displays just minor signs of previous use. More specifically, a Grade B device will have more than five scratches to its screen, but none that are visible at more than arms length away, and none that are deep enough to be felt with a fingernail.
Equally, there will be no heavy scratches anywhere on the casing, nor any cracks or any other signs of heavy damage that might have been caused by drops or smashes. There might be minor scratches to the bezel (the part of the casing on the front face that is not the screen) of a type similar to those on the screen, and there might be one minor dent to one of the corners.
The way we see it, if there are obvious signs of physical damage to the outside of a phone, you can’t trust the performance of the electronics on the inside.
Clean slate
We sell our Grade B mobile phones unlocked and reset to factory defaults. When mobile dealers talk about phones being ‘unlocked’, they mean it is capable of working on any SIM from any mobile operator. All of our mobiles are unlocked according to the GSM standard, i.e. they will run on any SIM from any European carrier.
In addition to being unlocked for SIM, we also ensure all the phones we sell have their access PINs unlocked, and on iPhones, all Touch ID and iCloud accounts. They also come with all data from the previous owner completely wiped.
Inevitably, no two used mobile phones will be in identical condition and we can only offer our gradings as a guide. However, with a Grade B phone, you can be assured that you are getting a good quality device that is in full working order with only minor cosmetic signs of wear and tear.
Take a closer look at our gradings standards here.
