The Next Mobile Of Choice

I am one of many people who are coming up to being able tochange in their old mobile phones and bask in the greatness of something new and interesting (until we grow bored once again). My question is, how on earth am i going to chose what to get?

6 month ago this would have been a nice easy choice for me, i would be jumping ship from my current provider and heading straight for the nearest Apple shop to bag me an iPhone. But the mobile landscape has change alot in such a short period of time and now there are a number of cool little phones on the market that do pretty much everything that the iPhone does, with some even doing it better.
The current line up we have to choose from if you want a touch screen smart phone is pretty much as follows, The LG Cookie, The Samsung Tocco lite, The Nokia N97, the HTC Magic and finally the king of the castle the iPhone 3gs. Now, i haven’t heard much about the new LG and Samsung, so i cannot comment on them too much, but u current own the last atempt at a touch screen smart phone from LG (the viewty) and after 13 months all i can say is NEVER AGAIN! The phone itself isn’t too bad, its a bit slow, the touch screen isn’t great and i have managed to make two hairline crachs in the screen by just carrying it in my pocket. But the worst thing about the phone by far isn’t acually on the phone, its the software you HAVE to use to get anything off the phone. The software is completely unusable, removing a magor advantage of having such a good video recorder on the phone.
Anyway, because i have been having trouble chosing my next phone, i have been thinking that maybe, just maybe i don’t need an all singing, all dancing smart phone and i can go back to basics with a crapy phone that is just a phone, but comes with a new laptop or something. I have seen these kind of offers in the window of a number of different phone shops on the highstreet, so i searches for one online to see what i would need to spend and what i could get, but it would seem that most of the offers of ‘free laptops’ are only if you take out mobile broadband these days. Back to the rawing board i guess.
So now ‘m back to square one. I really like the way that iPhone works, but its just so expensive compared to all of the rest. The next best i think is the Nokia N97. I have seen some demos online and all seems very nice indeed and the thought of not having to use a touch screen qwerty keyword for text messages seems nice, but i am not sure how powerful it is compared to the iPhone 3GS, and it just doesn’t seem as user friendly. What i do like is the HTC Google andriod phones, but i would like to wait until the new HTC hero is out before buying one, as the Magic is getting a little old now and i think the open source andriod OS will benefit from a more powerful piece of hard for people to continue the programing of new applications.
All in all i think i’m stuck and will probably end up seeing what my service provider can offer me for free when the time comes to change. If anyone reading this has any advice i would love to hear it.