The New Nokia 5230 Reviewed

By Author: Bonny Kominek
Total Articles: 50
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The new 5230, from Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Nokia, is an inexpensive younger brother to the more powerful Nokia N97, sharing many features with this model such as a touch screen, media playback, a digital camera, and GPS navigation.

Up until now, most of the touchscreen smartphones on the market have been rather expensive, with models such as the Nexus One, The Xperia X10, and the iPhone costing upwards of 200GBP. The 5230 is listed at a bargain basement price of 118GBP, which brings the smartphone within the reach of the average consumer for the first time.

It comes with 4GB of removable memory in the form of a micro SD card, which is enough to store thousands of MP3s, and more than a few full length feature films. The camera has a resolution of two megapixels, which is quite low when compared to more expensive smartphones, but does come with some advanced features such as ISO correction.

You need to use a virtual onscreen keyboard if you want to type anything into the 5230, as there is no hardware equivalent. There are, however, several other buttons on the case, such as red and green call buttons, ...
... a lock, a camera button, and a menu button that brings up a list of all the apps that are on your phone.

The 5230 runs on the popular Symbian operating system, which is something of a mixed blessing. On one hand, it is quite stable and runs very smoothly, but on the other, there are not nearly as many apps available for it as there are for Android phones or the iPhone.

One of the best things about this phone is the call quality, which is much better than you would find on some more expensive models. For basic tasks such as emailing and texting, the touchscreen is very responsive, but the relatively slow processor speed means that it can feel sluggish when running more demanding applications.

There are several social networking apps built in to the Nokia 5230, including Facebook and Twitter, and these are very well integrated with other features of the phone, such as the camera and the browser. There is no Wi Fi connectivity, so you are restricted to using the somewhat slower 3G services, but at this price point, you can hardly complain.

Many of the more popular Symbian apps, such as Gmail, assume that a hardware keyboard is connected, and will not work without one. You can get around this by using the browser to access these services, but it would have been nice if Nokia had sorted out these issues before releasing the phone. This review of the Nokia 5230 smartphone was written by Bonny Kominek. The Nokia 5230 is available with a contract from Vodafone in the UK.