Posting on something I've been using for a few months now for anyone else who is in the smartphone market. In December 2010 i got a HTC Desire Z smartphone on Orange 24 month contract for £30 per month and nothing up front. In that package you get the phone with accessories, and each month get 700mins of anyphone/anytime free, 500mb of internet bandwidth, and unlimited texts.
http://www.htc.com/www/product/desirez/ ... ation.html
I did look at getting an iPhone originally simply because that seemed the most obvious choice, but I couldn't get a deal with no up front fees (£100 down was the best offer), so looked round at other phones and took the opportunity to get a phone with a flip out qwerty keyboard as I much prefer that to a touchscreen which can get a bit crowded with the on screen keyboard. Having compared it with friends' iPhones, I actually much prefer mine and am glad I didn't get an iPhone. I've got to say this phone has changed my life quite a bit. I used to have an old PAYG phone which I virtually never used other than in emergencies, but this new one I use all the time, not just for calls, but email and the internet too, along with a whole list of additional apps, utilities & games.
I was a little concerned about the flippy out keyboard being something that might break easily & quickly. I few years back I took the gimmicky route and got the Matrix phone, Nokia 7110, with the spring loaded flip down mouthpiece, which became loose and started falling off quite a lot. I've had no issues with this phone. After 6 months the flip action is still as firm as it was the first day, and I've had no issues with it at all.
The phone came with a 8GB Micro SDHC Card, but I swapped that for a 32GB card from Play.com for £49.99, which was the cheapest 32GB card I could find. That allowed me to fill it with around 70 movies and a number of TV shows including series 1-3 of Gamesmaster. I used Handbreak to encode the MP4 files at 480x368 (4:3), 480x272 (16:9) or 480x205 (2.35:1) resolutions using the h.264 (x264) codec at a 2-Pass 330 kbps average bitrate, with AAC (faac) stereo 48kHz 96k audio (along with a number of other tweak settings), all of which play smoothly without any stuttering even in the high motion sequences, and still look virtually perfect on the 4" 16:9 screen. A 90 minute movie comes out about 300mb, while a 24 minute Gamesmaster episode is about 75mb.
A while ago two people posted on having sync issues when re-encoding my Gamesmaster DVD transfers for their phone, but I never had this problem at all. Just used Handbreak to encode direct from the DVD files and they were fine. I have all seven series of Gamesmaster ready encoded if anyone is interested. I couldn't guarantee that they would play on any given phone, as each one has different specs and may only have compatibility with certain A/V tweaks. If anyone is interested, I have them anyway.
The phone also comes with a 5 megapixel color camera, the quality of which is perfectly fine, but is nothing compared to my proper 6.4 megapixel SLR camera with a decent tripod, but phone cameras never tend to be that amazing anyway. It also has Google Maps, so with the GPS function & internal compass you can navigate in real time (the phone even knows which direction it's facing), and it has an in-car sat-nav mode too.
Since getting it I have also installed a fair list of free and paid for games;
Need For Speed: Shift (3D racing game)
Reckless Racing (overhead off-road racing game)
Doom (1:1 port of the old PC version)
Marvin - ZX Spectrum Emulator
GBCoid (GBC Emulator)
Gensoid (Megadrive Emulator)
SNesoid (Snes Emulator)
Although the phone 'only' has an 800mHz chip with 512mb of ram, this doesn't seem to equate to a PC standard of speed, as you'd have great trouble getting a 3D game like Need For Speed running on an old 800mHz Athlon PC as smoothly as this phone (Even the newest phones are still around the 1GHz chip / 1GB memory mark, although the Samsung Galaxy S2 top of the line has a 2Ghz chip). Most of the android specific games are so-so, but with the various emulators you can get access to just about any game made for any of the older systems, you can even get a PS1 emulator too (although you'd need the SD card space to copy the whole of the CD over, for each game)
I also have a long list of paid & free apps, of which these are the ones of worthy note;
Dolphin Browser HD (Best replacement for the stock internet browser)
Photaf 3D Panorama (takes & stitches together panoramic photos with the camera)
VitalPlayer (The best/smoothest/fastest media player I have come across, and I've tried them all!)
Out Of Milk (Great to-do list app)
Ebay Official Android App (Easier than using the Ebay site on the phone)
tTorrent Lite (Download torrent files)
Temp+CPU V2 (Homescreen system info display icon)
Advanced Task Killer (Akin to the windows task manager)
Gmote 2.0 (Turns your phone into a remote control for your PC)
ES File Explorer (The best file explorer I have tried)
SMS Backup & Restore (Backup and restore all your text messages)
All in all I'd highly recommend this phone, and any Android over any Apple phone.