I still have an ancient Nokia dumb phone (served me well for about 8+ years).
The S3 seems nice, but I don't want to spend more than 150Є for an effin' telephone!
(I really don't understand those that pay more than 600Є, the price of a good laptop!)

How do you tell which are the flagship models? People close to me have recently bought e.g. Samsung Galaxy Trend Plus (S7580?), and Galaxy S4 4G+ (GT-I9506). Are they flagship models, or derivatives? I presume the latter, as they are both "plus" products. Also, it seems Samsung has lots of models which are sold only in some areas, e.g. I am unsure if the aforementioned models are sold worldwide.

Then again, it wasn't like there was any choice anymore. The stores I visited were only selling these derivatives, not original S4 (GT-I9505X?) or Trend (which I assume might also be derivatives of something else?).

Samsung is pretty much like Nokia a decade ago, spamming the market with dozens of slightly different models. Maybe their point is to try to offer something for everyone, but in the end it just makes it all more confusing to choose one of their phones.

Anyway, I helped choosing the aforementioned phones. I checked some alternatives to Samsung too, but here it is hard to find much of alternatives to Samsung, Lumia and iPhone. Some Huawei models looked good in paper, but for some odd reason Huawei has apparently removed the application menu altogether from the user interface. Maybe it is supposed to make the phone less confusing for beginners, but for me it just made it more confusing, and much more restricted.

Lumia 620... why? Because, what you really NEED from a smartphone?

I still have a Nokia E66 in active use, ever since 2008. It is still very useful even as a car navigator, and web browsing with it is still quite doable. Naturally it doesn't have the newest social apps, but then I don't need them either.

But it is time for me to update it, the original battery lasts only one or two days anymore (pretty good for a 2008 battery though!), and I'm starting to run out of chargers. But otherwise the phone still works great.

Unrelated: the battery of our two year old Huawei Android phone (U8800? I think) got broken some time ago. No problem, I thought, I just go to a mobile shop and buy a replacement battery for it.

Seems though that finding a replacement battery may be next to impossible. The clerk was basically trying out different batteries blindfolded, checking if they had exactly the same knobs and notches as my broken battery, but he couldn't find one. Too bad batteries don't appear to be standardized. Then again, I guess laptops have exactly the same problem, each model has their own type of battery.

So, the U8800 is now useless. It lasted little less than two years, maybe that is acceptable for a 100€ phone, but it still feels a bit of a waste, as it otherwise still worked fine. Battery running time was always crap, though, it had to be usually recharged daily from the very start.

I would suggest you buy first a not-so-smart phone, just to get used to smartphone mentality (My own Nokia X3-02 is a perfect example of such a phone-I can listen to music, surf the internet and play games-though Nokia´s app store isn´t very good- and it has a touch screen and a customizable interface ! Well, its email function isn´t also very good, but I can always use a pc for that.) Anyways, whatever you do, don´t buy a windows phone (my mother hasn´t gotten used to her new windows phone quite yet, and she has it for three months already. Android is good indeed- my father has such a phone- and he can view word files and read ebooks on it !) I guess, that´s it from me. Just a last tip : always read reviews and note the phone´s statistics as weel- a very important one is the phone´s ray radiation-an example: a friend of mine has a phone that "burns" her ear when she speaks too much with it-mine isn´t like that, but perhaps that is ´cause it was bought by my father for my 17th birthday- I didn´t even have a phone before(that was a big surprise) !- and he paid attention to specifically this stat while buying it...

Edit -Wait, wait!!! Who necroed this thread ???

Well, ne_zavarj did, apparently, for some unknown reason. I didn't notice it was a necro, because the last post in the thread when I saw it was from the OP himself, so I thought nothing of it.

While the necro is up and active, I may as well chime in on my recent phone purchase: Motorola MotoX.

Not bad. It's just a hair on the big size for my smaller hands, but it works. Seems like a much cleaner (and more 'adult') interface than what I saw on the Samsung Galaxy phones. The voice activated features I've tried (not much, really) have worked flawlessly.

16GB (Sprint version) and no MicroSD slot so that's a bit of a downer. Battery is also built-in so you're stuck if the battery fails - not sure if this is really an issue. Camera is on the weak side: one resolution so you get enormous picture files (sucks for attachments) unless you install a third-party converter. Also, it's not great in low-light conditions. The video camera feature was very handy, though, having used it on Monday to help diagnose a machine problem: it has a slo-mo recording feature that drops the resolution a little bit and doubles or triples the frames-per-second. Overall the camera is so-so and I got better results from the camera in my older Hero. If you use the MotoX mostly for well-lit outdoor shots, then it might be fine for you.

Works great with my bluetooth headset. IIRC it has near-field transfer capability and a bunch of other crap that might be useful for some folks. Me, I just needed a good business phone and this has fit the bill thus far. Downloaded a couple HTC Sense interface apps that I missed from the Hero. Not sure how well 4G works since I leave that turned off - 3G works perfectly fine for email, text, and music streaming, I'm on the wireless network at home, and 4G drains the battery faster.

There are fancier phones out there but I appreciate that it's not bogged-down with a million features I won't use. It doesn't have the name cachet of the Galaxy or HTC One but it's a good option if you don't need an enormous feature list. My only big regret is that it wasn't the 32GB version (not offered on Sprint at that time).

Ok, proud user of "cheap chinaphone here". Year ago i purchased "cheap" chinese Zopo Zp950H android phone - 4 core, 1Gig of RAM, good battery, good 720p screen. No fancy things like NFC or USB OTG...but for whole year i NEVER was disappointed with it.
If you want to save some - take a look at chinese brands, they not that bad as many things.