Nokia 5230, the Most Valuable Nokia Touchscreen Smartphone

Since my 2nd iPhone left me for repairing cracked screen glass [link], I wanted to get a smartphone as the backup of iPhone. It should have similar iPhone features (touchscreen, 3G, Wifi, GPS..) but at more affordable price.

I found Nokia 5230 touchscreen phone.

It is cheap, around RM600-RM800 (USD175-USD235). Nokia 5230 has a big touchscreen (3.2 inch), supports 3.5G, GPS, powered by Symbian v9.4 (to run latest symbian apps). But, it does NOT support WiFi.

If you need a Nokia touchscreen phone with all features: 3G, GPS, WiFi, and better camera with flash, then is the one for you. But it is about RM300 more expensive than Nokia 5230.

Nokia 5230 brief review

By coincidence, my dad too wants to buy a new phone. His requirement is simple: touch screen phone with handwriting (chinese) input and GPS.

With my recommendation (evil grin), he bought the Nokia 5230 and I got a chance to play it for a night.

In the box, we got the Nokia 5230 phone (white), a short (7.5 inch) USB data cable, 3 changeable color battery cover (red, pink, blue). Changing the battery cover is not as easy as it seems, it bends like almost want to break when you lift the battery cover.

The user manuals is only available in English and Malay (Malaysia).

The body of Nokia 5230 is quite thick, plastic feel but light weight. The touch screen is sensitive to tap but not so for scrolling.

There is a SIM card slot at the side of Nokia 5230. But, you still required to remove the battery cover and battery before you insert a SIM card into the slot.

That’s a weird design, in my opinion.

Nokia 5230 has all the ports at the top of the phone: USB, 3.5 mm AV jack, power port. There is a slider at the side to lock/unlock the phone.

The 2 megapixels camera of Nokia 5230 is not good. It has no auto-focus nor LED flash. The image quality is bad with a lot of noise.

Nokia free software

The 5230 is a “Comes With Music” phone with unlimited music downloads, but we lost the Comes With Music activation PIN which should be included in the leaflet that came with our device… (no way to recover it?)

Update: Nokia 5230 comes with 2 different packaging: Vanilla and “Comes With Music”. Only the “Comes With Music” package (RRP: RM1010) has the Comes With Music activation PIN for unlimited music downloads. The one I bought is WITHOUT ComesWithMusic…

The first thing we do with the Nokia 5230 is fully charged it. Then, I plug it to a PC, download and install the Nokia Ovi Suite, the Nokia software for desktop. (Nokia Ovi Suite for Mac is under development).

I downloaded and installed Nokia 5230 phone software updates via Nokia Ovi Suite. It is hundred MB download and it updated almost everything in the phone! The Nokia 5230 performance seems increased and touchscreen is more responsive. :)

I highly recommend every Nokia smartphone users update the phone software as soon as you got your new Nokia phone.

Another good stuff of Nokia Ovi is the FREE Ovi Maps! You can download navigation maps of over 70 countries worldwide for free!

You can download more free softwares for Nokia at Ovi Store.

My two cents

If you want to get a touchscreen phone but with a limited budget, get Nokia 5230.

It has the same touchscreen, same processor, same operating system as the higher end Nokia touchscreen phones but tagged at a much cheaper price. A valuable smartphone, I would say.

Over to You

What do you think about Nokia 5230? What’s your choice of touchscreen smartphone? Do you have a backup phone?