Using a ZTE Blade Android phone connected with USB is a bit tricky with Ubuntu 11.10.

First you need to apply the patch in this bug, after doing that you should get USB storage to work.

After doing that, it is also possible to get development and debugging to work over USB. Create a group androiddev (addgroup --system androiddev), and add yourself to it (gpasswd -a yourUsername androiddev). Then create a file /etc/udev/rules.d/11-android.rules with this content (4 lines, watch the line breaks):