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A pre-owned foldable might offer a tantalisingly thrifty price tag, but you’ll probably pass by a few red flags to watch out for on your way to the checkout screen.
Although some brands like Samsung have begun to offer more affordable foldables like the Galaxy Z Flip 6 FE, most smartphones that are built to bend still come with a fairly hefty premium attached.
As such, it’s no surprise that resellers of refurbished devices like Reebelo, OzMobile and GreenGadgets have become one of the better options for those looking to spend less on a foldable phone. In Australia, refurbished foldable smartphones can be found through many of the same websites that you’ll find their non-foldable counterparts.
If you visit any one of these websites above, you’ll be able to find devices like the Google Pixel 10 Pro Fold and the Galaxy Z Flip 7 available for as little as less than half the usual recommended retail price.
This makes them only a little more expensive than a modern mid-ranger like the Google Pixel 10a nowadays, and that's the kind of steep discount that’ll likely get the attention of those looking to buy a foldable on a budget.
However, we looked into the fine print and didn’t come away with all that much confidence in the quality of the secondhand goods you’re buying here.
Although more recent foldable devices like the OPPO Find N6 have brought significant improvements when it comes to durability, the underlying and unavoidable elephant in the room is that foldable smartphones are more complicated than standard ones. The extra mechanisms involved with getting a screen to safely bend one way and back again inevitably translate into more potential points of failure should something go awry.
Given that, you’d expect that these devices might be subject to more scrutiny or care than their static counterparts.
According to the GreenGadget website, refurbished devices sold by the reseller are subject to “a strict 72-point quality check”, but so far as we can tell, that standard is applied across both foldable and non-foldable devices.
This is a bit of a red flag because, as explained above, the inner workings of a foldable device come with additional elements like a hinge. GreenGadget’s refurbishment process may have some sort of alternative set of quality checks for foldable devices. However, at face value, there’s little indication that is the case.
When we reached out to GreenGadget, we were told that information about the refurbishment process could not be shared due to unspecified “privacy” reasons – which doesn’t really inspire a whole lot of confidence.
We also reached out to both OzMobile and Rebeelo with the same question. Do these resellers hold foldable smartphones to a higher standard, given the fragile hardware? On both counts, we only received silence in response to our queries.
We plan to keep on digging into the topic, but right now, refurbished foldables feel like a bit of a risky business. If three of Australia's biggest refurbished device retailers can’t answer a simple question about the standards they apply to foldable smartphones, then trusting them with your hard-earned cash feels like a bit of a gamble.
The list of things that could go wrong with a foldable phone is already long enough, and while opting for refurbished might save you some money in the short term, it could make that list even longer.
Fergus Halliday
Digital Content Editor
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