Good luck. I've been stalling my parents on upgrading their feature phones, as verizon has neglected any refresh to its regular phone selection. The choices are old and/or awful.

If you are willing to pay the mandatory 9.99 for 25MB of data on the "multimedia phones" you'll get a better selection. However if you have a 39.99 voice plan, the additional 9.99 is a 25% bump in cost -- not the direction to go when you are looking to reduce costs.

You might consider looking at the verizon-compatible selection on eBay. In addition to phones that are as good or better than the current verizon offerings, you wont have to sign a 2 year contract and could keep that option for the future should, you budget for a smartphone, Verizon offers compelling new pricing plans, or they introduce a great feature phone.

 

LG Env touch my friend has it and i love it the youtube is amazingly fast and the battery life is excellent

 

I sympathize. I've spent months psyching myself up for a shiny new android phone, only realize at the moment of truth that adding another $50 to my bill wasn't the brightest move for me. I'm currently on a voice only $10 line on my parents' family plan with AT&T, so I'm trying to decide between an extra $20 for a feature phone or $30 for an iPhone (which I would promptly jailbreak and duel boot with Android). I've seen some speculation out there that Froyo is enough of a performance boost to allow android to run on feature phones, so I'm praying that shortly after Froyo goes official some kind souls will start hacking the feature phones for those of us without the technical know-how to do it ourselves.

 

I liked the samsung alias. it flipped open in either portrait or landscape, and had a full keyboard.

 

A friend has that and said she'll keep it until it's pried from her cold, dead hand.

I let it go at that.