After months of agonising, I ended up getting one of these. Unlocked they were going for $480 on the street, so I got one online for $260 (plus $15 postage) and with a 2G memory card bundled in.
I thought about getting a touch-screen but I just don't have that much use for one. An Android or iPhone? Apps are of limited interest to me, bar one.
I rarely use the keypad as I almost never call outside my contacts list, so a slider made sense to get rid of the keypad when not needed (ie: almost always). On the other hand, while I don't text much, on the rare occasions that I do, I absolutely HATE thumbing in text, so the full keyboard was a nice, if not really essential, bonus.
On the downside, the built-in music player doesn't support my preferred music format. From reading around and between the lines, it appears that the sole reason is that the big media companies don't like a format that doesn't inherently support crippling with Digital Restrictions Management crap. While a vorbis codec is available for the S60 OS, Nokia have gone to some trouble to make sure you can't plug 'non approved' codecs into their latest version. So screw them: I installed folderplay. It doesn't muck around with playlists or other such junk, you just point it at a folder on the memory card and it will walk the files/folders inside and play what it finds, in sequence or randomly. My folder structure is my playlist, so it is just what I needed.
It is annoying that the paying customer has to jump through so many hoops just to get proper functionality though. Of course the whole industry relies on the fact that most of their customers wouldn't know a decent-quality, open-standard audio codec from the crappy case-study-in-how-not-to-do-it pay-a-royalty-to-use MP3 format that they have been told is 'the modern thing' (can anyone say 'so last century'?). It is the price for having to live amongst the mind-killed drones, I guess.
So other than the above case of big faceless corporations screwing over their customers' choices and shipping an unnecessarily sub-standard product all in the name of pandering to their big business buddies, I am happy enough and hope to get a good several years out of this device.
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