5 Inexpensive Smartphones: No Perfect Choice5 Inexpensive Smartphones: No Perfect Choice

Rodney Brown is a veteran of both the newspaper world and the retail management world. Having held nearly every job a newspaper has, from selling advertising to running the presses, he truly has been an ink-stained wretch. Now, with the web, he is pixel-stained. He cut his teeth in technology retail at the long-gone New England camera and technology chain Underground Camera. Following that run, he spent some years as a manager for the nerdiest of nerd retailers, Radio Shack, before returning to journalism. He has been blogging and tweeting for years under the handle Burly Adopter about all things tech, with a focus on the mobile and networking technology business space while at Mass High Tech. These days, he has Skype, Oovoo, Communicator, Google Chat, and all kinds of communications tools on his smartphone, an Android-based Samsung Droid. But every now and then, he misses his first smartphone, a WebOS-based Palm Pre.