Nokia C5 review

Nokia C5 smartphone is now available in India. The 3G-enabled Nokia C5 is a 'socially aware' smartphone device that comes integrated with Facebook, MySpace, e-mail support and instant messaging services.

The smartphone market is getting much competitive these days. The likes of Apple and HTC dominate the headlines with their extra shiny devices, but that is not what every user longs for.

Some people still want a phone that does the basics, without having a hefty price tag, and this latest Nokia device looks to those people. But does it fulfil those needs?

Nokia C5 comes equipped with a 2.2 inch non-touchscreen display and runs Symbian S60 third edition. The handset sports a 3.2 megapixel camera with auto focus and LED flash features and enables video recording VGA at 15 frames per second.

First, when looking at the Nokia C5 we weren't exactly blown away. It was a bit of an awkward shape, very long but without the width to match, giving it a stretched appearance.

The mish-mash of light and dark metallics, along with a black matt screen surround, also made it look like a Frankenstein phone, cobbled together from some spare parts left on the factory floor.

We will give it credit though for not feeling on the heavy side, despite its slightly bulky depth, and having decent sized buttons for a phone that is a lot smaller than some of its competitors.

The buttons do dominate the look of the device though. It is almost as if it was designed to be childproof, with no surround to the buttons to ensure you don't miss what you are dialling.

Above this comes a group of seven buttons that are badly placed. The central large button doesn't take you to the menu, which intuitively you feel it should do, and the two small silver buttons that lie between the other four are hardly noticeable until you have spent a lot of time with the device. When one of these is the cancel button, it becomes quite a pain.

The screen then takes up the top half but it felt Nokia may have put more time into the buttons below. The screen is TFT colour but of pretty poor resolution - 320 x 240 pixels.

There is a nifty task bar that runs along the bottom of the screen which it editable to fit your regular application on there but navigating it with the large button below was quite fiddly and kept skipping over our choices.

You can add extra applications onto the home screen as well in the centre, with the default of calendar and emails. Yet with a screen so small – 2.2 inches – it made the whole thing look far too busy and forced everything to shrink in size to fit in, making it difficult to read as well.

The device weighs 89.3 g (with battery) and comes preloaded with a 2GB memory card. However, the memory can be expanded to a maximum of 16GB. The device comes enabled with HSDPA connectivity and GPS with free Ovi maps with turn by turn navigation along with free guides from Lonely Planet and Michelin.

The C5 handset offers audio messaging, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 port, 3G support, FM radio, Class 32 GPRS, EDGE and front-facing VGA camera. The other key features of Nokia C5 include stereo speakers, 3.5 mm audio jack and Nokia messaging.

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