Hey man, I live is Seattle. IT is the turtleneck wearing lattte sipping people who go gaga over the smart phones. That aside I think apple, HTC, Samsung and all those guys pour a huge amount of time a research into making good user interfaces and sexy exterior design. As I said I actually have an ipod touch, which I like very much as it basically my laptop now... I don't own a laptop because I have no need of one really, all i really need it for is the occassional webbrowsing and emailing when I'm not at home or at work. Its great, but it doesn't really fall in line with my expectations for a phone.

You can knock cheaphunks of plastic all you like, even I have my preferences in that I like a flip or slider so that keys are not erroniously pushed or have some kind of retarded key lock button combo. But any cheap phone can handly the three things I do fairly well which is call, look up numbers to call, and text. Pretty much everything on the market has a reasonable interface with mappable buttons to do those three things with ease. That it is always nice to know that no matter how many times I drop my phone it will mostly likely continue to work, work as well as it did before I dropped it, and not crack that very nice and shiny touch screen and get all spiderwebbed and shit like my touch is currently.

As perhaps all great conversations anywhere you go, this probably has more to do with individual value. I don't want or need a data plan, the ability to surf the web or update twitter/book with my every step or breath. Sometimes I like it that my battery dies and can completly escape the ability to communicate with others. If I want to do other things I really don't mind single purpose devices. So no, the price is not what I'm willing to pay, for the phone or the service. And the nice thing there is that faster networks really don't mean much to me, basically what I care about is coverage area, which at least down here doesn't seem to matter much either. If someone else wants all that sleek user interface and multifunctional capability... my wife basically...thats totally fine and I don't really care. I don't have to get the same thing so I don't. Easy.