Buying a cell phone - another market failure?

Amazon.com: Cell Phones: PCS Phone palmOne Treo 650 (Sprint)

I need a new cell phone. My old one, which I never liked, is falling apart. I figured I'd have a few options. Wrong. Amazon reviews capture what I'm seeing everywhere: poor design, poor reliability, poor customer experiences. It's a combination of a crummy service provider attitude (such as disabling key phone functionality to encourage purchase of high price services), lousy service provider customer support, and phones designed to sell rather than to provide a lasting value to the customer.

In other words, yet another market failure.

I'm going for the simplest possible phone with the fewest features, and using the Apple iSync compatibility list as a quick guide to clueful manufacturers.