The mobile phone saga.

Last year my abo ended and I could get a new abo with new phone. I opted for the nokia n78. The choice was not to well thought out, but in the store it felt ok enough strength wise and I could sync it with my mac. It also had wifi, so I could easily use it as mpd controller.
It turned out the telephone has an impressive amount of features, but utterly fails to implement even one of these features decently.

• The phone is ok, quality is decent. But picking up and hanging up can be a pain. (more about that later).
• It is a crappy agenda.
• The camera is useless even for quick snap-shots that do not need to be good. The 2nd camera is even worse.
• Wifi is ok, but useless without a decent browser or mail client.
• Syncing with mac results in duplicate entries in a contact, frustrating as hell. I do use the official nokia plugin for iSync.
• Who needs a FM transmitter?? even if you want it, you need to wrap the antenna around the phone inside the radio to get a decent reception.
• Software crashes constantly. It has a multimedia key (or how they call it) that gives you a cover-flow ish access to the multimedia keys, this crashes constantly.
• it has a scroll wheel (apple style, you need to scroll your finger over the edge of a button). Until now I haven’t found anybody who could scroll to the right item with it. (I asked several people to try it). And it is non-functional in most part of the gui.

Given all this, I could have lived with it. I  can make a phone calls, I have contacts synced with my agenda (sort of).
The phone seems solid enough. I dropped it many times, even when riding my bike. It survived with only a few dents.

But the buttons, are the real problem.  The number buttons is a bar (full width, 1mm high) you need to press the bar at exactly the right place with your nail or top of finger (to closed spaced, to small button).
The buttons to pick up, answer and enter option menu are embedded in the top cover. You need to press the top of phone down.  However the top is one part, so pressing the right side in (where the hang up button is) can also result in clear or the option menu (located below and above it).
So hanging up a call 1/2 the time results in switching the call to handfree mode. Clearing a character results in pressing hang-up key, causing your sms to go lost, etc.

So all in all, I need another phone. Either I will go for a linux based phone (andoid or n900) or a very very basic phone.
To get to the point off the rant, I need some advice for the following 2 things:

• What is the best (price efficient) linux based telephone to get.
• What is the best cheapest (preferable clamshelf so it screen is well protected) phone to get.  iSync sync is a huge plus but not a hard requirement.

Off-course donations are very very welcome, as budget is non-existing. Current level in the donation pot is € 30.

Q

p.s. If people wonder what I did with previous donations (as it was insufficient to get a new battery for my laptop), I bought books and a few linux games from it. I also used some of it to make donation to one or two other projects and also for gmpc icons.