It stays true to Nokia's no-nonsense, sturdy built quality, and considering it's essentially a dumbphone, internet use and social networking hasn't been neglected.

ENGADGET: Hands-on with the Asha 205 and Nokia's Slam quick-sharing feature (video)

The carrier has announced that "roughly half" of its G1 buyers traded up from a dumbphone of some sort, which should really help them put that nascent 3G network through its paces in earnest.

ENGADGET: T-Mobile reveals some juicy G1 stats, half of users traded up from dumbphones

The good news here is that the system actually displays a far more intuitive menu layout on the screen than what's available on your dumbphone, enabling users to flip through schedules, photos, videos and playlists with ease.

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The TouchWiz UI is plenty speedy, the browser was about as good as you could expect a Samsung dumbphone browser to be, we had an easy time adapting to the landscape QWERTY keyboard (and the numeric one, for that matter), and -- this is a biggie -- the screen felt really good.

ENGADGET: Samsung Highlight comes to T-Mobile, we play with it Mobile

China's ZTE, which has somehow silently risen through the ranks to become the world's number six phone manufacturer by volume, is said to be prepping a renewed global assault that will see it move beyond its typical role as a provider of low-end dumbphone fare to occupy the low-end smartphone niche, a market with traditionally limited choice.

ENGADGET: ZTE looking to move upmarket, build lots of smartphones