I just bought a new smart phone. It's Nokia 5530 XPressMusic and I can recommend that.
It doesn't differ that much from iPhone (and you can find many apps to Symbian easily from the internet), costs only half of it.. Not that I've used iPhone, because it doesn't seem that interesting to me.
To me it the has worked well so far. There is no actual keyboard, which is a bummer. So perhaps N97 is a better option?
Nokia E55 is also a super good phone.
As for programming. I haven't programmed almost anything, but when I was in elementary school we had some programming there. That was taught in PASCAL. It's such a nice language =D.