Best buy: *Free* with free line rental or a free Dell Mini Netbook from Mobiles.co.uk (White) or Mobiles.co.uk (Pink); or £64.95 on PAYG from Dialaphone (Black, Purple or White) or £68.95 from the Carphone Warehouse (Black or Pink).
Review: January 2010.
The 5230 sits alongside the Nokia 5530 in Nokia's growing range of entry-level touchscreen smartphones. You might think that the 5230 lies below the 5530, but that's not exactly true. They cost the same on contract (i.e. free at around the £15 per month level), and offer similar but complementary features. The 5230 and the 5530 enjoy a peculiar relationship: if one phone lacks a particular feature, you can bet that the other has it, and vice versa. So the 5230 has 3G, but is missing WiFi. It has an A-GPS receiver, but its camera is rubbish. Its display is larger than the 5530's, but the phone is bigger and heavier too. Are you getting the picture?
Let's rewind this review and get back to basics. The 5230 is a Symbian S60 smartphone targeted at pay as you go and contract users looking to pay no more than £15 a month. That's a big market, and we expect the 5230 to be a relatively high volume handset. The good news is that it's the latest in a series of similar phones, so you can be confident that the bugs have been ironed out of the firmware and that the phone will work.
Physically, the phone looks almost exactly like the Nokia 5800, which is the Daddy of this type of handset. That's a good thing too, because it means that you get a very large 3.2 inch display, with a high resolution of 640 x 360 pixels. That's not quite as many inches as an iPhone, but its more pixels, so that you can tell that to your iPhone-owning mates! It's a resistive touchscreen, which isn't as smooth as the capacitative type, but it works well enough and has the advantage of coming with a stylus. The display is fantastic for web browsing, multimedia and simply working with menus. It's a larger phone than the 5530, but that's because of the larger screen and bigger battery inside.
The 5230 is a 3G phone, unlike the 5530, and has high-speed HSDPA, offering download speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps. It is missing WiFi however, so if WiFi matters more to you than 3G, choose the 5530 instead. If you really need both, choose the 5800. It does however have Bluetooth and USB connectivity.
The 5230 is not branded as an XpressMusic phone, and it lacks stereo speakers. But it does have a music player, FM radio and a 3.5mm audio jack. It also has the bonus feature of an A-GPS receiver, with Ovi Maps supplied.
The most disappointing feature of the phone is probably its sub-standard camera. With just 2 megapixels and no flash or autofocus, this is suitable only for quick snaps. The video camera is better, but with no video calling option. The poor camera is the phone's weakest feature and is probably the biggest reason for choosing the 5530 instead.
The phone comes with a respectable 70 MB of memory and this can be expanded to 16GB by adding a microSD memory card. Sadly, you won't find one of these in the box, so be prepared to fork out a few quid for one of these. You might also need to buy a USB cable too, as this isn't included either.
We mentioned that the 5230 weighs more than the 5530. The main reason for this is probably the increased battery size. The 5230 enjoys excellent battery life as a result.
It's a funny one, the 5230. It has some great features: the large touchscreen display, Ovi Store for apps, 3G, GPS, superb battery life. But it also has some disappointments: no WiFi, no video calling, an awful camera, and an unexceptional music player. Still, if you're looking for a touchscreen smartphone, there aren't many in the price range, and the 5230 expands the choice available.
Features of the Nokia 5230 include:
- Symbian S60 5th edition smartphone
- 2 megapixel camera with 3x digital zoom
- Video recording at up to VGA resolution and up to 30 fps, 4x digital video zoom
- Display: Touchscreen, 16.7 million colours, 640 x 360 pixels (3.2 inches) with automatic display rotation and proximity sensor
- Nokia Ovi player (MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA formats)
- FM radio
- Ringtones: MP3 & video ringtones, 64-voice polyphonic ringtones, vibration alert
- A-GPS with Ovi Maps 3.0
- Voice commands: speaker independent dialling and voice commands
- Voice recorder
- Integrated handsfree speaker
- Messaging: SMS, MMS, email (support for IMAP, POP, SMTP) plus attachments, Audio messaging
- Internet: HSCSD, GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA (3.6 Mbps), XHTML web browser
- Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0, micro USB 2.0, 3.5 mm audio jack, 2.5 mm Nokia AV connector
- Memory: 70 Mbytes plus microSD memory card slot (up to 16 GB supported)
- Offline mode
- 3G plus quadband GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)
- Size: 111 x 52 x 16 mm
- Weight: 113g
- Talktime: up to 7 hours
- Battery standby: 450 hours
- Music playback: up to 33 hours
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