My workhorse 'smartphone' - the Nokia e71 decided to act up during the recent trip to Kolkata. A trip to a care center stunned me. The projected bill was around 7000 INR with 5000 INR being the Bill of Materials. The surprising part of course was that when the cost was put across, the itemized list which constitutes the Bill of Materials wasn't. 

Is this an accepted practice ?

With my phone hardware refresh cycle coming up I am looking out for an Android device.

Currently I am using an e71 and while it has been an excellent handset - rugged (it has survived falls from around three and a half feet on to concrete and emerged without a scratch, has fallen with the screen hitting the floor and didn't even blink and once it has dropped from my pocket on to gravel and bounced about a bit), good battery life (although I've read about folks talking about the battery life it hasn't caused my much grief) and, nicely balanced it is beginning to be a bit long in the tooth. That and the atrocity that is the Ovi app store convinces me to not have a Symbian device.

The predominant use of the handset has been in:

• checking email (both corp and Gmail)
• synchronizing calendars (both corp and personal)
• browsing (mainly using Opera Mobile)
• IM (Mundu IM provides me enough to get online and they responded to the issue I had - big yay ! there)
• shell login (putty works nicely)
• social networking (primarily Gravity and sometimes Snaptu)
• miscellaneous stuff (viz. Skype, Podcasts, Internet Radio, bit of photography and some bookmarking)

So, while I need to keep the above in mind, I am kind of looking forward to moving to a touch-screen based experience rather than menu based one. And, I need a better set of apps (and perhaps a better App Store).

Which brings us to the meat of this post - what are the Android devices that are coming up in the next 4 months which I should be looking forward to ? And, they should be Android 2.2 based (not the 2.1 or, lesser upgrade to 2.2 path for me). Of course once I've decided on a device the next step would be to figure whether there is an RSA soft token available for it. The lack of it could be the reason to choose another path.