[GadgetKen]

@meir, I paid about US$109 that included registered airmail to the US from an ebay dealer (with cash value of ebay points earned and redeemed, mypoints and airline points earned real price is probably closer to US$100). Took only 1 week to make it from Shinzhen, China to Connecticut on the US east coast, and there was online tracking.

I think my particular model was made for export to Russia and the Baltic Republics because the keyboard has both English and Cyrillic characters on it.

@rfranzq, analog tv tuner works on a local low power Spanish language station. Might be useful to me when traveling to countries where still analog or doing both analog and digital transmissions. It's a multi-standard tuner (NTSC/PAL/SECAM) that you switch standards by choosing the region then country from a menu. There is an automatic scanning tuner and manual channel selection. The extendable whip has to be the thinnest rod antenna I've ever seen on any device.

@bbob, battery capacity on 2 standard (Nokia BL-4U clones) packs they included was 1000 mah. Just ordered an 1800 mah battery over ebay yesterday, and that should be more than adequate for a days use. Don't mind putting it on a charger each day, but would prefer not to have to switch battery packs. Size of the battery pack appears to be the same from the pictures and the battery codes printed on it, think it will fit OK. Even if a few millimeters thicker, there's still enough room (I hope) under the battery cover. Think difference on higher capacity packs in this case is using higher capacity cells in the same size (or very close in size) case.

The phone does have a touch screen, but it's faster for me just to use the directional keys and keyboard rather than drag out a stylus.

Also an oddity is the sim1 position has a flip up style combination microsd card holder and sim card holder where you slide the cards into the flip up piece and then push it down and lock it. Sim2-Sim4 are more traditional flip up the sim card holder and place the sim directly on the PC board.