Phone review - Nokia 5230

It sucks, avoid.






Edit: Oh I expect you want to know why, right?

BAD...
1. The battery lasts about 8 hours. The quoted battery life figues from Nokia are lies, big fat lies with bells on.

2. The NSeries OS is a bit sluggish most of the time. It has a habit of bringing up a question dialog and then another one shortly afterwards so you end up clicking things you didn't want to.

3. It cannot receive MMS when there's an internet connection active. Ok, there may well be a technical reason for this but you'd think that closing an internet connection would be a trivial operation wouldn't you? Turns out that it's next to impossible to turn off all connections unless you have the reflexes of a cat. About 50% of the time the phone crashes at OS level when you try to kill all network connections. The other 50% of the time the connection comes up automatically a few seconds after you kill it. And getting to the connection settings dialog takes a few settings and you can't edit them while the connection is active. Fail.

4. Ovi store apps are next to completely worthless, especially the free ones. The quality is so low as to be laughable and they are covered in adverts (predictably).

5. The GPS sucks. I've not even been able to get a fix with accuracy better than 90 feet, even on a clear day on top of a hill when my 6-year-old germin eTrex can get a 18 foot fix from 6 satellites. Epic fail.

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GOOD...
1. The screen is excellent, very clear and sharp, unless you're outside when it's impossible to use.

2. The touch-sensitivity is actually excellent and very responsive.

3. I can use Gmail and that is actually very good. It more than makes up for the lack of MMS. Who the hell uses MMS anyway?

4. The internet browsing speed is so-so. I've seen worse, this is with Vodafone I should mention. I have many gripes with VF's internet foibles but that's not relevant now.

Assisted GPS ftl... what's your mobile phone reception like on said hill?

Should've gotten Android. Not only would you have enjoyed an excellent GPS app, but an excellent Sheepy horn app for when people tell bad jokes.

Nokia tend to put so many damn features in a phone, they end up being a drain on the battery life. I have a N75 that sucks worse. 2 hours of talk is all I am able to get, but the GPS is decent.

I have a N73 Music Edition phone. It has a 3.2 megapixel camera. With its photographing abilities and the music playing abilities, it's an awesome piece. The phone features have degraded in speed over time (I have had it for about three years now, had lent it to my wife for a few months in between). The phone has become very sluggish, the latest firmware has not helped either.

I still have it around for playing music and photography. Finding a replacement for it on these two counts is a costly affair, so I shall probably retain it till it lasts.

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