I have been a lucky man to have my wife give up her old Motorola e815. This phone rocks for a number of reasons. While it's no smart phone, it's does enough for my purposes that because I didn't pay for it, it's smart to me. It's one of the few free-with-contract phones with EVDO I have ever seen, so using it as modem is extremely bearable. But even using the old-school Openwave browser on it with EV as compared to my old free samsung is noticeably snappier. It also has a microSD slot, and copying photos, movies, and music to it is relatively easy. Making ringtones for it is a snap too.
Browsing free models from Verizon these days with their goofy rooty-tooty-new-every-two promotions, I don't think I'd be as lucky to find a comparable phone, especially in terms of reliability. While the e815 is noticebly beaten, Eva's shiny black Samsung's camera phone broke within three months. Who cares, it's only VGA.
Even if I found something that matched on technology numbers and perhaps reliability, one thing scares me the most about a new phone; a shitty UI. Moving back to a Motorola phone, even though my last one was from character lcd, the UI is leaps and bounds better beyond many technologically superior phones i've had a chance to interact with. While you say you might want a smart phone, what people really want is a smart UI.
