Last week, I picked up a pair of Quansheng UV-K5 for less than $90 and so far, I'm pretty impressed. In terms of quality, it's probably only a hair above the Baofeng radios), but it's got something that most other radios don't: it's flashable! It's also got 200 channels (instead of Baofeng's 128) and a rating of 4.4 stars on eham.net.

After a bit of “research”, I picked a popular firmware and documented the process here.

For the price, I think I might pick up another pair...