While buying a decent touchphone for my friend recently, I had browsed through a lot of these new age cheap and not so cheap cell-phones.. and mind you its a jungle out there..
The new in towns like HTC, Micromax, Lemon(gawd) mobiles, and the not so new Samsung’s & Nokia’s present some rather tough situations for the wannabe Touchscreen (I prefer to call them the press screens, coz most of them dont actually respond to the innocent touches, a press however suffices most of the time!) Owners!
Now after a long and hard trial, we finalized the supposedly talk of the towns - Nokia 5230 & the Samsung star. The nokia 5800’s and the 5320’s (which by the way is the phone that is now shown as the review product picture), are steeply priced and hence were left out.
Now, I personally would have went for the Samsung Star had it not been for its squared out odd looking shape, which is elegantly shaded by the new 5230 touchscreen from nokia. Plus the 3.2’’ widescreen looks sharper and more elegant than the 3.0’’ screen of the Star.
A feature comparison revealed that the Samsung Star is having a 3 MP camera while the 5230 has a 2 MP one, but in reality I could click better pictures from the 5230, and the video quality was even superior.
The features and details could be found in the Nokia page for 5230 - https://nokia.co.in/find-products/products/nokia-5230/ and hence, I would stick to some lesser known facts -
The major pluses in 5230 -
1) At a price of only 7600(approx) , the new Nokia 5230 touchscreen is a steal.
2) The camera (even though low resolution) was superior quality with both still pictures and videos. After some research I found out that it records QVGA DVD quality videos, same as the high end 5800 Xpress music edition.
3) Handling was pretty easy (of course, it needs a little bit of getting used to, but well that remains in all touchscreens)
4) Wide 3.2’’ display screen is pretty wide and decent for proper viewing of videos and movies.
5) Music player was decent, Nokia stereo headsets (WH-102) are rocking.
6) The new shortcut key, which basically opens up the customizable shortcuts bar, is a major plus for ease of use.
7) Personalizable video ring tones is an efficient add-on, stylish and fun to have.
The drawbacks - As with almost all the phones, the few drawbacks would be -
1) No flash. For the excellent camera that it has, an added flash would have made it so much better.
2) No memory card included, and 70 MB of inbuilt memory. (Though a 2GB micro SD would now come as cheap as 250 bucks, it shouldn’t be much of a bother) It’s expandable upto 16 GB.
3) The speaker is not that impressive, and the ringtones tend to get lost in noisy places, and you might want to keep it on vibrate mode.
4) No USB cable included, and the normal I pod USB cable doesn’t work in it. A dedicated USB cable has to be purchased, guess its just another money making scheme, because all the older models used to come with a USB cable allways.
5) No Wifi, which again is subjective as most people don’t use this feature in a mobile device.
Overall, A little getting used to is needed to get accustomed to the newer features and the whole touchscreen thing. Packed with a whole lot of features, this one is such a tease.
All in all, if a touchscreen with so few drawbacks comes at such an unbelievable price, It’s a steal, which exactly defines the Nokia 5230. If you are in for unbelievable features at believable prices, this one is for you.
Let me know your views and comments.