Chris Mills - 

According to some new research, there’s £6.86 billion of second-hand handsets just sitting around UK homes doing nothing. Although this is sort of interesting by itself (though the ‘research’ should be taken with a lethally large pinch of salt), the most shocking thing is the most valuable second-hand phone in the UK. And no, it’s not an iPhone.

It’s a Blackberry. Yes. Although I struggle to believe it, the UK’s most valuable used handset  in January 2013 is not an iPhone 5, or a Galaxy S3 or something like that. No, it’s the Blackberry ‘Porsche Design P9981′. Considering it cost £1200 when it launched a year ago (over a grand! For a Blackberry Bold!) I guess it’s no surprise it’s still selling second-hand for way too much money £547, but come on — who actually bought one of those aberrations in the first place?

At least this research shows that anyone who did is a total sucker. Not only are they the owner of one of the world’s ugliest and most overpriced phones, but said monstrosity has lost over half its value in a year — HA!

About the rest of the research: sellmymobile.com (so hardly an unbiased source, let’s be honest), comissioned research into how many old phones folks have lying around at home. They concluded that there are 91.5 million unused phones lying around; they then applied an average device value of £75 (because that’s the average value of phones traded in on their website) to reach the stunning £6.86 billion figure.

That’s a lot of dough, but I’m not persuaded — I think the overwhelming majority of phones lying around at home will either be broken or old bricks, with a value far lower than £75 (which is about what you’d get for an iPhone 3GS or 4, just for comparison’s sake).

Still, let’s not forget the key message here: for god’s sake, don’t buy a Blackberry Porsche Design phone. Not only is it a bad handset that’s been uglified and had a whopping price tag stuck on, but it’s also a worse investment than Apple stock.