Nokia 5230 is a full-featured touch-screen smartphone at an easy-on-the-pocket price / 25.08.2009 05:21

Now that 1 percent of the world's mobile phone owners have an Apple iPhone, which phone 99 percent of people want to have next? If they intend to follow the touch screen and App Store trend initiated by Apple, their best option is to check out products from major brands in the mobile phone industry. Nokia, Samsung, LG, HTC all have a good selection of touch screen phones. Touch screen smartphones, however, tend to have higher price tag than other phones. There is one exception; Nokia, and the 5230.

The Nokia 5230 is a touch screen smartphone with practically all the features smartphones tend to have. The 5230 looks like another Nokia-style device. It is running on S60 menu software and Symbian operating system. For a full-featured touch screen smartphone like the 5230, the biggest attraction, however, maybe its price. Nokia expects the product to retail for under 150 euros as an unlocked, SIM-free phone. When bundled with Comes With Music service that provides unlimited music downloads without extra cost, the price is expected to be 259 euros. Changing cover plates are back; the back cover of the 5230 can be changed.

The Nokia 5230 has 3.2-inch, 640x360 resolution touch-sensitive display. It is a GSM phone with UMTS 3G network connectivity as well. Other features include GPS, 2 megapixel camera, video recording at 640x480 resolution, Ovi services, MP3 player, video player, Bluetooth, USB, microSD card slot and a standard headphone jack. Other touch screen mobile phones from Nokia are, for instance, the 5800 XpressMusic, Nokia 5530 XpressMusic, and the N97.

A word of caution for everyone who is already on his or her way out to pick up the shiny Nokia 5230. Typically, the biggest difference between a more expensive smartphone and a budget smartphone is performance. The cheaper model tends to be built on a slower processor, which means slower response times and somewhat slower application execution. Also, the cheaper model tends to have less memory capacity, which means less storage space for music, photos, and applications and fewer simultaneously running applications. That was just a reminder, because in any case, a full-featured smartphone is an exciting device to own and use.