Nokia 5230

So I went for a £99 Nokia 5230, a Vodafone PAYG handset, with whom I already have my existing monthly contract. Some good points, some bad. All in all I can't wait for my broken N79 to come back from the Nokia Service Centre, but here's some highlights of the 5230 so far:


+ A-GPS with...
+ Ovi Maps with full worldwide voice guided sat-nav (on a £99 handset, result!)
+ Finally a bit more control over the home screen (formerly known as active standby)
+ Hardware lock button
+ Decent build quality, despite being all plastic
+ 3.5mm headphone sockets, fairly standard for Nokia it has to be said, others finally following suit...


- Resistive screen fairly poor
- Too many "double touch" moments in menus, S60 5th Ed not great for the touch paradigm
- Duplication of options menus, with "Options" and the '3 stripes' button labels in many applications
- Nokia Sports Tracker just about installs (with warning of incompatability), and fails to run
- Mail for Exchange, only installed by grabbing the Nokia 5800's installation file
- Mail for Exchange refused to play natively with Google, had to use Nuevasync instead
- Java apps (Gmail, Snaptu, etc) have ugly touch d-pad GUIs
- Only 2MP camera with no flash (but only a £99 phone, to be expected)
- No WiFi, no deal-breaker for me, but is to many others


Its a shame about some of the application incompatabilities and the Java app d-pad, because apart from that the hardware is good for the money. Maybe it just shows the 5800 and N97 classic/mini handsets are worth the extra cash if you need the extra features. This should just be a stop-gap handset until June when I'm due an upgrade however...