Nokia C5-03 Review: First Look
Nokia C5-03 Review: First Look
Nokia has been losing market share to newer entrants like Apple and Google. Google has been the biggest threat to Nokia’s reign in the budget smartphone market. Android is now marching over to the budget touchscreen segment with sub $200 phones. The Samsung Galaxy 5, Galaxy 3 and the Huawei Ideos will be some of the best budget touchscreen mobiles.
Nokia is trying to reinvent itself and has announced many new phones, including the new Nokia N8, which has been lauded for its hardware. It is probably the best Nokia phone yet, but the OS - Symbian ^3, according to most users cannot match up to iOS or Android in terms of usability or app support.
The Nokia C5-03 is a new touchscreen smartphone by the Finnish manufacturer. It is priced closer to the entry level segment and offers a nice mix of hardware specifications coupled with a stylish design. It will be priced at around $220 and offers almost all the standard smartphone features.
Design
The Nokia C5-03 is one of the best looking budget touchscreen smartphones I’ve seen in recent times. The clean finish is inspired by the Nokia N8. The phone has a refined look with a metallic finish and rounded edges.
It is quite compact with dimensions of 105.8 x 51 x 13.8 mm and weighs just about 93 gms. The front face is dominated by the 3.2 inch TFT resistive touchscreen display with a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels. Below the display are three keys - Call, End and Menu.
User Interface
The Nokia C5-03 runs the older version of the Symbian OS - Symbian ^1 which has been optimized for Touch. The newer Symbian ^3 would have been really awesome, but in a budget phone, even Symbian ^1 is a good thing to have, I suppose. It is powered by a 600 MHz ARM 11 processor and comes with 128 MB RAM with 40 MB internal storage.
The user interface is quite intuitive and easy to use, but it isn’t comparable the the Android UI or the iOS interface. It does support a fair number of applications and games and also has Ovi Store for downloads.
Multimedia
The Nokia C5-03 offers some of the best multimedia features in its price range. It has a 5 MP camera with an image capture resolution of 2592 х 1944 pixels. It is a fixed focus camera which can also record video at the VGA resolution at 15 FPS. It comes with a stereo FM radio with RDS and also supports all the standard audio and video formats including 3GP, MP4, H.264, WMV, MP3, WAV, WMA and AAC. It comes with TV-out so you can view the content on a bigger display.
Connectivity
The Nokia C5-03 is flush with connectivity options. It offers GPRS, EDGE, 3G HSDPA and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g with UPnP. It also has Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 connectivity.
It comes with the improved Webkit based browser and supports a host of other third party browsers like Opera Mobile, Opera Mini and Skyfire. It also comes with a GPS transceiver with A-GPS and Nokia Maps.
Conclusion
The Nokia C5-03 is a nice touchscreen smartphone for those on a budget. It offers almost every standard feature and comes with a fairly good OS with limited application support. It is fast and sports a very good design. In this price range, it is a good buy. Also do check out this list of the best budget Android smartphones for more choices.
