Apple iPhone 5 (CDMA / global)

Haha... and now with $350 subsidies on smart devices, it must seem even more lopsided to the average consumer. Now, it costs me $50 to get a decent clamshell phone whereas I can get an Android or WP device, or an iPhone 4, for free on contract. The cost of feature phones is still exactly where it was for the last decade, but the smartphone has been made just as affordable, if not even more so, than the average feature phone or basic phone... as long as you are willing to ignore the fact of the higher subsidy, which most consumers ignore quite willingly because they often really don't care how it works as long as little or nothing comes out of their pocket at the point of sale.

That's why I now only buy stuff that is four or five years old already. Once I realized that I could get an in-box new Nokia N800 internet tablet for less than $50, I finally snapped one up earlier this year. It runs just fine for its specs (up to 400MHz on OS2008 Diablo, 128MB RAM), and does just about everything I could possibly want to do with it (well, it somehow cannot handle movie playback at VGA 15fps or higher, but I'm not going to watch movies on it anyway).

Then again, I don't buy stuff because of need anymore, because in my current state of being I don't really "need" anything at all... I just bought it for fun, and because four year old electronics become super cheap, just to try it out and take the challenge of making something personalized of it (which isn't too hard to do with Debian - root and chroot!).