Used cellphone market taking off

Many customers for these retreads are more interested in price tags than multimedia messaging or games of Snake II. "They say, 'I just want to make a phone call,' " said Jay Ellison, executive vice president of U.S. Cellular (www.uscc.com), a wireless carrier based in Chicago, which operates in 26 states and maintains a small inventory of refurbished handsets in its stores.

But there is also the cellphone equivalent of the preowned BMW. ReCellular, a company based in Dexter, Mich., resells about four million handsets in bulk worldwide each year. Of the 1.5 million it resells domestically, mostly for use in prepaid wireless plans, "plenty are higher-end with cameras and bells and whistles," said Eric Forster, an executive for the company, which finds buyers for phones collected by charities, as well as retailers' overstocks and trade-ins.