The Tech Nut

Further reading : The Hunt – Part 1

Yup, it’s finally here. After a great deal of cajoling my Mom, a task which requires almost infinite patience, she finally gave in. Plus, when she had a look for herself, she rather liked it, and is very, very jealous…

But first, a bit of background info. Before the release of the 5230 and the 5530, the 5800 was the prime offering in this category by Nokia. It sported WiFi, 3G, a 3.2 MP camera and a better pair of built in speakers. It was launched at around Rs. 19,000, but it’s come down to around Rs. 13,000.

The 5530 and 5230 were released together. The 5530’s got a new design with a bit of metal thrown in, a 2.9″ touchscreen, a 5MP camera, Wifi, but surprisingly, no 3G! You can get it for about Rs. 12,000, which means that Nokia still wants to keep the 5800 as the flagship all touchscreen phone in that price bracket. All the phones run on the Symbian 60 (S60) operating system.

The Bundle

• Nokia 5230 (duh)
• Battery (BL-5J)
• Charger (AC-8N)
• Nokia Stereo Headset (WH-102)
• Plectrum Stylus CP-306
• User guide

To be frank, it’s poor. No bundled memory card. Not even a sodding data cable! But the phone does come with a stylus, and little wrist strap with a guitar-pick-shaped plastic thingy to use with the touch screen.

The earphones bundled are the standard Nokia earphones, which are just about bearable. The cable, as usual, is way too long. The charger is kind of scary. It’s bigger than it needs to be, but has the same port that most Nokia phones nowadays use.

You also get 10 free songs from Ovi Music, which I am yet to redeem.

The Looks

Well, I can understand why Mom’s jealous. It’s almost identical to a 5800. The phone is definitely a head-turner, as is with most touch screen phones. It’s got a 3.2″ widescreen display with a resolution of 360×640, which is quite high, compared to my old 3109c. The phone sports 3 buttons on the front, the green one on the left for making calls, or bringing up the call log, the middle one for bringing up the Menu, and if you press it for a couple of seconds, will bring up the list of running applications (will get to that in a minute). The red right button is to end calls and close applications. The phone has a proximity sensor on the front, which disables the touch screen and dims the display while making or receiving calls. Speaking of the screen, it’s extremely vibrant and supports 65k colours if I’m not wrong (which I probably am).

Nokia dudes have been considerate enough to supply a plastic film cover for the screen. It will come off soon, and I intend to replace it, because scratches on plastic are not a problem, but if it gets on the screen, it’ll be scarred for life.

The phone has volume control buttons, and a little touch button right above the right corner of the screen, which causes a little drop-down menu to appear, from which you can choose the media player, video player, web browser etc. Apart from this, the phone has a spring-loaded Hold button. This button locks the screen and disables the touch screen till you toggle it again. My major gripe is that this button looks like the kind which might fall off soon, mainly because it wobbles ever-so-slightly on the spring. But seeing that I had the same misgivings about the volume buttons on my old Nokia 3109c, and they never came off, I can safely assume that Nokia build quality won’t fail me.

The phone has a Nokia-specific mini-USB port, which is just a little different from the normal mini-USB, but effectively renders the cable useless. So you’ll have to purchase a cable separately, unless your PC/laptop has Bluetooth, in which case you could use that for transferring data.

The camera (2 mega-pixel, more on that later) is housed in a little bevel, presumably to protect the lens from scratches. There’s also a camera button on the side of the phone. Speaking of bevels, all around the touch screen, there’s a slight raised border, to prevent if from getting scratched if its dragged across a table or something (not that I intend to try).

The SIM card and the memory can be removed without opening the back cover. The memory card is hot swappable, but I wouldn’t say the same about the SIM because I haven’t tried. Speaking of the back cover, it’s a tricky thing to get open. Requires you to dig your nail in a groove, yank, and hope the thing doesn’t break. Surprisingly, to attach the wrist strap, you open the back cover, thread the loop through  a hole in the side of the phone, and grab it and loop it around a screw of sorts. The speaker is a mono-speaker on the left side of the phone. It’s reasonably good, but not as good as the one on a 5800.

The Interface…

… rocks. As can be expected from a touchscreen phone. The one major problem with the 5800, was that it was a bit sluggish. This problem isn’t noticeable in the 5230. The one problem I had was that it wasn’t as sensitive, as say, an iPod Touch, and I wonder if its because of the difference in technology (capacitive v/s resistive), or because the plasic film gets in the way. Still, it’s pretty responsive, but scrolling using the scroll bar can be a bit cumbersome. But scrolling with a flick of the finger is easier, especially with kinetic scrolling, which keeps the list scrolling after you flick it.

The phone also has an accelerometer, which adjust the screen according to which orientation you hold it in. But it’s a bit sluggish, and only works when you turn it anticlockwise (i.e. on its left side), not all the way around.

Typing in T9 is amazingly easy, because the buttons are so huge. But when you turn the phone, in landscape view, you can type on a full QWERTY keyboard. This might take some time to get used to, and I’m still making tyops typos.

The home screen houses a little side scrolling carousel at the top, where you can keep your most used contact for quick access. You can also assign a picture to be displayed with each one. Below that is the mail application. Apparently a trial version of  Nokia Mail is available. But don’t worry, even after the trial expires, you still have the standard messaging e-mail interface to use. Below that media keys appear when your listening to music. At the very bottom is a shortcuts bar, where you can keep your frequently used bookmarks/applications.

Managing network connections (like EDGE, is very easy, because touching a small icon near the battery meter gives you access to the Connection Manager. Alarms can be quickly set by touching the clock. Naturally, the phone has voice recognition, which is surprisingly accurate. Also, the phone has handwriting recognition, but I don’t advise using that, mainly because it’s pretty time consuming. And handwriting recognition with your finger is nigh-impossible.

You can customise the phone to a great degree. You can set the screen brightness, backlight timer and loads more.

Applications

The 5230 comes preloaded with a ton of amazing applications. There are apps for YouTube, Facebook, Friendster, MySpace, Amazon and Hi5 (sic) preloaded. The browser in the phone is very decent, and I haven’t needed to install Opera yet.

The music player is pretty good. Displays album art, and has an 8-band equaliser, and you can store your own presets as well. It can play mp3, .m4a, .aac and .wma files. You can create your own playlists on the go, but the only gripe I had with it, was that there’s no way to access the Now Playing playlist.

The video player is also well done, and I have to tell you, videos on a 640×460 widescreen look amazing, even if it’s just a silly YouTube video you made. There’s also RealPlayer for streaming video, but unless you’re some bloke called Sunil Mittal, I advise against it.

There’s also a radio application, which, predictably, uses your headphones as an antenna. That’s decent, and supports RDS, which allows you to pick up the name of the station and the current playing song, if the station’s transmitter supports it.

But perhaps the most outstanding feature is Ovi Maps. This phone supports GPS, and paired with Maps, means you’re unlikely to get lost again. Agreed, transferring maps over GPRS will be expensive, but there’s an alternative. You can download all the maps for a country, if you’ve got the Ovi Suite. India’s maps weigh around 103 MB, but they’re incredibly accurate. The Map application is a bit sluggish, but predictably so, because the application isn’t exactly lightweight.

But I was extremely disappointed when I found out that driving and walking instructions were paid services. You can set a destination, but it’ll give you the directions only for about 15 seconds, because transporting you to the store to buy a license for the service, and it ain’t cheap. Rs. 99 for one dayRs. 3000 for an year! Still, you cans till set destinations and just get Maps to point you to it, which is still fine. Plus, this is a phone, not a dedicated GPS device, but the fact that they didn’t advertise the fact irks me. .

UPDATE : Nokia has released a new version of Ovi Maps, which you can find here. This version has free navigation instructions as well!

The phone also supports A-GPS (Assisted GPS), which connects to an online server to get satellite data to quickly get a GPS fix. I used the GPS on a bus, and it worked flawlessly, and drew eyeballs!

There are 2 preinstalled games, and both are pretty poor. One is a 2D rollercoaster game, which isn’t particularly interesting, and then there’s the DJ Mix Tour, which is like a touch-based game like Guitar Hero, bu supports MIDI like music (sic). But the Converter and Calculator and very bad. The Converter has no presets, and the Calculator has no scientific mode!

One thing I noticed about this S60 phone is that file management is rather automated. Unlike in my old 3109c, which had S40, where I could specify exactly where I want my files, in this phone, the File Manager is hidden away under the Office subfolder inside Applications. Alternatively, you can arrange stuff after connecting the phone to your PC.

There’s an Application Manager, which allows you to delete applications and specify settings for ones you want. There’s also a separate Application Settings menu for the pre-installed applications.

The camera, being just a 2 megapixel camera, isn’t spectacular. It supports a maximum resolution of 1600×1200, and works best in landscape view. The best thing, is unlike some S40 phones, I can instantly delete a picture if I don’t like it. There’s also an image editor, which is pretty decent. But video recording is amazing. The resolution is widescreen (you can specify what size you want), and the framerate is around 24-30, I think.

Althought the phone came without a memory card, it supports microSD cards upto 16GB. The phone itself has 70MB internal memory.

The Verdict

Eagle-eyed readers would’ve missed one detail – the price. This phone – this S60, 3.2″ widescreen touch interface, 2MP camera, GPS enabled with navigation, 3G enabled phone  – retails for Rs. 8,500. The MRP is a bit higher, but I bought it from a Nokia Priority dealer in Malviya Nagar.

Honestly, at this price, I can ignore all the little niggles – the lack of a memory card and USB cable, the flaky hold button, the not-as-sensitive-as-an-iPhone touchscreen, the lack of full GPS functionality, the trial e-mail service, the poor camera. This phone is amazing value for money, and I expect people to buy it in droves.

I might post a battery life update later on, so watch out for that as well.

Tags: 5230, Nokia