Smartphones are becoming a big deal for low-cost carrier Cricket.The company formally announced the Kyocera Zio earlier on Tuesday, but they also showed me the surprise Huawei M860, an Android 2.1-powered phone that's even less expensive.

I got hands-on time with a half-dozen new Cricket phones today, and they're no longer all about voice and text. That follows the Cricket customer, execs said. Many prepaid customers don't have PCs at home, and they use their phone as their primary form of Internet access. So the ability to get a phone with a great Web browser at a reasonable price should mean a lot to them.

The $249 Sanyo Zio will be Cricket's higher-end Android device. It's made by Kyocera, but Kyocera owns the Sanyo brand and uses it for classy things. The Zio runs a 600-MHz processor and Android 1.6, but it will get an upgrade to "at least" Android 2.1 during the fourth quarter of this year, Kyocera's John Chier told me. The phone seems best-designed for Web browsing, thanks to its big 800-by-480 screen. Its body is a slab with a somewhat slanted top and bottom, rather like Samsung's Captivate for AT&T. I found the phone to be responsive and perfectly usable. Kyocera and Cricket haven't changed Android around much, except to add some custom Cricket apps: account management and backup apps, a custom app store (which supplements, rather than replacing the Android Market), and a few games.

The $199 Huawei M860 is Cricket's less expensive phone, but it will launch with Android 2.1. The M860 is thicker than the Zio, and feels a bit cheaper. The screen is a lower-resolution 320-by-480. The phone also packs a 3.2-megapixel camera. But the M860 has some interesting twists of its own - a good-looking custom clock widget, for one thing, and a very strange "2-D" set of home screens that scroll both horizontally and vertically, and minimize to let you jump to any individual home screen. This is not quite standard Android. The changes aren't awful, and they seem genuinely useful, but they'll irritate Android purists.

Cricket also showed off the $299 BlackBerry 8530, but the more I looked at it, the less appealing it seemed. The 8530 is great for messaging. But every aspect of it is more expensive than the Android phones - the phone costs more, and so does the plan, with Cricket's BlackBerry plans running $60 rather than $55 for the Android plans. Cricket said that the cost of running BlackBerry servers drives up the cost of BlackBerrys for them.

Just below the smartphones, Cricket has a slew of new touch-screen and messaging phones that work with $35 and $45 plans.

The $159 Samsung Messenger Touch is probably the best of the bunch. It combines a small, resistive touch screen with a relatively usable keyboard of small, rounded keys. The phone has a soft-touch back, and it feels good in the hand. The Messenger Touch's interface is a hybrid of Samsung and Cricket's ideas. The main screen seems to be user-customizable, with touch buttons that jump to email, the phone dialer, and the contact book. Dig down, though, and you get a lot of links to custom Cricket apps and social networking services, many of which are actually just links to WAP sites. It all looks a bit messy.

If you don't need the touch screen, Cricket is introducing the $159 Kyocera Rio, which basically looks like a Messenger Touch without the keyboard - another small, oval phone with a resistive screen, but without the sliding part. Here, you have a three-tab interface with a main menu, "apps" and "weblinks." I could see typing on a touch keyboard that small getting very old, very fast.

I also checked out the Cricket TXTM8 3G, an upgrade to Cricket's current messaging phone. This one I liked; it looks like a rip-off of Motorola's Q9, which was a Windows Mobile phone with a very good keyboard for typing. The phone looks squarish and classy, with big keys and a relatively traditional icon-based interface with clearly explained features.

All of Cricket's new phones will work nationwide soon, thanks to a 3G roaming deal that Cricket signed with Sprint. So in Cricket's markets, you'll be using Cricket's network; outside those markets, you'll be using Sprint's. That makes Cricket a viable competitor to the other, much more expensive smartphone carriers.