Best secondhand android?

[DonorConceivedMe]

DD’s ancient inherited android is slowly dying. I want to get her a secondhand replacement from eBay but I’m not at all knowledgeable about phones. Any recommendations? Budget is up to £100, preferably less. She would like to use apps like WhatsApp and duolingo but doesn’t need anything fancy.

I would recommend you go to somewhere like CEX that offers a warranty (2 years) rather than buying from ebay, because android phones are quite notorious for starting to have battery problems after 2-3 years. For that reason, I'd definitely go for something with a removeable battery so that you can buy a replacement when this happens. It's also a useful fallback for things like emergency restarting the phone. With the warranty, you also get some protection if the phone later gets blocked for being stolen or something. That's quite unlikely through CEX because they have to run checks before buying stock in, but does occasionally happen. It's more common over ebay as you are essentially making a private transaction.

Usually if you ask the staff in there (I used to work in one), they would be able to show you a selection, tell you when a phone was first released (so you can guess at how old it is) and which phones tend to come back with problems and which phones seem to work well even when they've been used before. If you have a bit of a play about on it in the shop a good test of how it does is trying out the camera to see what it's like, and also google image search as loading up images is pretty intensive. You can also then compare different phones to see which are nicer to use, which are more responsive, etc. Take her with you if it's not a surprise.

I bought second hand Huawei P10 pro through Mazuma.com and its been fab. as good as my previous HTC bought brand new.

Great advice. Thank you. These points hadn’t occurred to me!