Mobile Operator EE UK Launch All-New Refurbished Phones Range
Broadband and mobile operator EE (BT) has this morning launched its new refurbished smartphone range with airtime, featuring iPhone and Samsung smartphones – priced from £31 per month – and claiming to offer customers a “high-quality, more sustainable and cost-effective way to upgrade“.
The range comes with extended warranty included for peace of mind, as well as using manufacturer approved parts, and a 40% discount on airtime plans for students. The devices are all available on “up to” 36 month Flex Pay agreements to spread the cost of the handset over a prolonged period. Every phone is also said to be “rigorously checked” and “tested” before being sent out.
The device inspection is said to include a 53-point quality check, which verifies everything from battery health and camera precision to ports and speakers. Every phone also arrives in recycled EE-branded packaging with a genuine charging cable.
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Sharon Meadows, MD Marketing & Commercial, EE said:
“Our new range of refurbished smartphone Flex Pay plans makes great technology accessible to more people, in a way that helps both budgets and the planet. Refurbished is no longer a second choice, it’s now mainstream, with younger customers leading the way when it comes to thrifty, sustainable choices. Our launch will give them and consumers across the UK, total confidence they’re getting a high-quality device, backed by EE’s extended warranty and award-winning support, along with access to the UK’s best network.”
At the time of writing the page for the new service wasn’t yet live, but it should go live on their website sometime this morning.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Hopefully the quality checks will detect and report on any burnt out camera pixels.
This is an emerging problem with phones, with one of the causes being the intense strength of the emitter used by LIDAR sensors that are starting to be seen on vehicles, especially autonomous vehicles like Waymo (but not Tesla, as that company believes that real time video analytics in the infrared spectrum is enough for safe autonomous navigation).
Camera burn leaves a speckle of dots in all subsequent images, making the device useless for high quality images (more noticeable in images of uniform colour at some light levels). Maybe something that camera software/image processing can work around by interpolation (taking multiple in quick succession leveraging minor hand movements and interpolation across the images, or interpolation in a single image later)
If the phone is faulty you simply return it, that’s what the warranty is for. Damage caused by LIDAR is going to be incredibly rare given it’s not particularly prevalent in the UK as yet.