Buying a Smart Phone

07-26-20, 01:58 PM

1. I buy a lot of used electronic stuff that has no moving parts, like cell phones, so long as it comes with at least a limited warranty. My theory is that if it'll do what I've bought it for when it arrives, then it probably will continue to work for some time. Been operating that way since I first got into PCs back in the 1980s and that plan has worked for me often enough that I see no reason to divert from it.

The chief problem with used phones is used batteries. Some phones (mostly hi-end) don't have a user-changeable battery, which means the clock is ticking from the time you receive it before the battery fails and the entire phone with it. My previous every-day phone was an HTC, which I bought used. When it was new it was their flagship phone and retailed for ~$600. I bought it three years used for $120 and used it myself for three years before the battery discharge rate became unpredictable. So I got three years of fully-functional service out of it for $40 a year. Now it's my "home phone" and stays in a charging cradle on my desk so battery life never comes into play.

With phones with a user-changeable battery, battery life doesn't become a problem so long as they're manufacturing that particular battery. Li-Ion batteries age whether they're being used or not but they age faster if they're being cycled. So if you buy a used phone with a removable battery of a particular size that no other phone uses (and space is so limited in a cell phone that most use a battery tailored to its exact dimensions), that phone's service life begins to run out once they're no longer making new batteries for it, even if all the other hardware is in perfect working order. After that you're left to buy old stock new batteries which might be new but still are old so they won't have the same service life as freshly-manufactured new.

Bottom line, in terms of return on investment, and so long as you neither need or want technology that is only available in a newer phone but that wasn't available when your's was made, and so long as you shop carefully, used phones IMHO are an excellent value.

2. You need to dig into the specifications for the KardiaMobile application and find out exactly which versions of iOS and/or Android it will run on. I don't know from iOS but the most recent Android version is v.11. Prior to Android 10, all Android versions were named after some sweet treat. Android 9 was "Pie," 8 was Oreo, 7 was Nougat, etc. I mention this because the Android nerds habitually refer to a version by its sweet treat name rather than its version number. So if your KardiaMobile app's documentation states it will run on Android Lollipop or later, you'll have to dig to learn that Lollipop = Android 5 (5.0 or 5.1). Then make sure you buy a phone with a compatible OS on it.

3. IMHO either eBay or Amazon are excellent places to look for a phone, especially a used one. Amazon has an excellent reputation for standing behind what their vendors sell but I find I get better prices -- particularly on used -- on eBay. The trick to eBay is only buying from a vendor who has a rating high enough to give you confidence in what he's selling. You'll have to set the height of your bar in that respect. For a high-volume vendor I like an approval rating of 98% or better but I still check the individual negative ratings to see what's gone wrong in the "bad" transactions. In a lot of the negative reviews I find that the buyer was complaining about something insignificant or had unrealistic explanations of the purchase, so I discount them. And I've got some excellent deals from low-volume dealers who might have had a questionable average rating but found nothing in their negative reviews to give me to believe they weren't a trustworthy source. And as a last resort, most bank credit cards have a measure of buyer protection included in the service.

Just make sure they vendors you're considering will accept returns, watch out for high restocking fees, and read the fine print.

4. Regarding Verizon, I'll skip (most of) the technical mumbo-jumbo and say this. Come the first of January, 2021, Verizon's network is making a dramatic change and switching entirely to something called VOLTE. With VOLTE the voice signal ceases being analog and is strictly digital end-to-end, which they claim will result in a dramatic improvement in call clarity. The problem is that not all of Verizon's old phones support VOLTE. Come the first of January, many old Verizon-branded phones will cease to work on their network. In fact since earlier this year Verizon has refused to accept new business from any customer with a non-VOLTE phone. When my HTC started to get flaky, I tried to re-register the Samsung I had used before that, but they refused it because the Samsung was not VOLTE-capable, even though I had used that exact same device on their network just a couple of years earlier.

If you're buying the phone direct from Verizon, they've stopped selling anything that isn't VOLTE-capable, so you should be golden if you buy from them. But if you're wanting to buy a phone that Verizon will accept off Amazon or eBay or other 3-rd party seller, it gets tricky.

Verizon doesn't build its own phones and what they do is pick a specific model of phone to have have branded as a Verizon phone. So it will have the Verizon logo on the boot-up screens and maybe in some menus but the hardware is still the same as the non-Verizon phones of the same model number. In most cases this exact same model of phone will be available elsewhere but just without the Verizon branding. But the trick can be determining exactly which model it is that Verizon sells.

When my HTC became unreliable I did research and decided I wanted a Motorola Moto G7, which Verizon was selling for $300. I checked on eBay and found the same phone could be bought there, either "open box" (meaning it might have been used as a demonstrator in a store but was never used regularly and might still carry the full original warranty) or brand-spanking new for $50 to $150 less than Verizon's asking price.

But when I started looking at the details of the phones on offer, I found there were several different model numbers listed. All of them were XT1962-something but that something could be 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6. And I guessed that Verizon was only going to allow me to use one of the six on their network.

I went back and scoured that phone's page on the Verizon website but it just didn't say anything about XT1962. So on a whim I selected the "buy" option to see what information might be available once the phone was in my "shopping cart." And sure enough its SKU showed as XT1962-1. So I went back to eBay looking for listings for XT1962-1 and found one brand-new, still factory sealed in the original box, for $200. Which I bought and lived happily ever after.

So really the only "catch" to buying from other-than Verizon is in determining exactly which model of that phone Verizon is selling. In some cases the eBay vendor will state the phone is Verizon-ready. Provided they state that in the ad, and provided they take returns, then if you get the phone and find out Verizon won't accept it, then it's the vendor's fault and his responsibility to put it right. But I made doubly-sure by confirming the full model number through the SKU listed on Verizon's website. I just checked and the SKU even shows up on the main web page for the random phones I looked at (didn't have to resort to putting it in my shopping cart).