Barbara wrote to us with the following questions:

PLEASE HELP! Ole Lady afraid 2 ask her kidz; What are EDGE? VGA? DROID? HTC? I have a Razor/4yrs/worn out. I don’t text., Want phone, organizer, wireless internet if I don’t have added bill. I like the idea of Touch Screen, but my daughter says they’re too sensative. Already have Motorola bl tooth, bat ch and car ch. Please tell be best/LEAST EXPENSIVE way to go. Thank you!!!!

Here’s what our friendly customer support guy had to say:

Hi there Barbara,

Thanks for your question.

I completely understand how confusing this all this. The cell phone market is still very technical, when most of us just want a reliable phone that lets us communicate.

First of all:
EDGE – this is simply a technology that allows data to be transferred to your mobile fast. You have probably heard of 3G? EDGE is one type of 3G. Don’t worry too much about this. It just means your phone will be able to browse the web.
VGA – this means your phone will have a nice colour screen.
DROID – this could mean Android, which is a mobile phone operating system (OS) from Google, or it could mean the new Motorola Droid phone, which runs on this operating system. It is a competitor to the iPhone, in that it provides many great internet features. Probably out of your price range, though.
HTC – a company who specialises in making touch screen phones, and recently started making all their phones on the Android OS.

The only phone with a decent touch screen, in our opinion, is the iPhone. So probably avoid the others for now until they catch up.

From what you’ve said we can recommend sticking with Motorola. So we’d suggest the following phones: Motorola Zine ZN5 – it has a lot of great features, including a great camera – plus WiFi which you can use for free when you are near a hotspot. It is getting on to a year old so it is not too expensive, yet still has all the features to rival newer phones.

Hope that helps!