Dont spend a bunch of money going with a carrier-branded phone bought through a carrier. My top suggestion from experience and from considering the various amounts of money a BlackBerry can cost, is to start out with a BlackBerry Q5, can be bought real cheap because of the bad rap BB falsely has here in the USA. $100-150-ish brand new, you can go black or white or if youre lucky hot pink, you can go 3-G or 4-G, i personally find 3-G to be faster and simpler on battery / data plan. It has the micro media card slot, and it can be used with any plan, but i do not believe you can use it with Verizon. If you dont want a keyboard, go Z-10 for a nice normal sized phone, or Z-30 for a slightly bigger phone with a kicka$$ battery. The newer Leap I dont have so i cant speak to, it will run you another hundred over the Z30 but the Z30 has better features. Z30 is now out of production and madly underpriced at $250. (Z30s and Z10s can also be 3G or 4G or 4G-LTE.).
No buggyware, you can have android apps if you want them, wiping means wiping if you ever choose to do so, your data is gone and no one can bring it back. All your important stuff can be safely saved on your media card and retrieved, rather than going to 'the cloud.'
I like the Q-5 for its high value low cost ratio, the zippiness, and the serious cuteness factor.
There are several other BlackBerry-10 options as well to check out, if you want to avoid the apple /android dichotomy, check out crackberry.com in addition to BlackBerry for good info from real first-hand users and fans. Honestly, android WILL give you headaches with the hundreds of unwanted apps that come with the territory. I have never had an Apple phone, so i can only say that i heard the horror stories of their new iphones eating up gobs of data for no apparent reason, and my BlackBerrys have never done that to me. BlackBerry is a brand i will not switch from until and unless i am forced to, which i think may happen eventually, because their level of security /privacy is beyond what our government wants the average user to possess, and they are just simple and fun to use, with the hub showing all your incoming everythings in one accessible sweep of the finger. They can do what android can do, too, people just dont know about them anymore and the media is still not giving them a fair showing, much to my surprise. I have the android versions of Pandora, Sirius, Live365, and my favorite Slacker radio all working on my BlackBerry 10s. Plus downloaded music on the media card, and a few other streaming music/talk apps as well.
I expect to get razzed /ignored for posting in praise of BlackBerry, but this is my first-hand experience, after fighting with an LG optimus Pro as my first smart phone, which was a bossy buggy and very invasive device, i was about to go phone-less over it bc i did not know about BlackBerry. I am speaking of the new operating system full featured phones, all do video and stuff, and do NOT need any special 'provisioning' by your carrier, like the old BlackBerry 7s do supposedly (although i found it all happens by itself when you put your sim card in the phone without even telling the carrier), but the 7s are still alive and kicking and wonderful for compact reliable talking and texting and streaming media or playing downloaded media, if thats all you do anyway. The thing is there is not much more to pay to get the new vs the old, so why not get the new.
The 'old' BB's i bought were all new-in-box, not secondhand, i bought both from ebay and amazon, and bought my Z30 from BlackBerry.
Oh, and ... BlackBerry phones are yet to be hacked.
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