The Most Affordable Nokia Touchscreen – the Nokia 5230

Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia is widening its touchscreen product portfolio with the launch of its Nokia 5230.  Designed as an entry level handset but with social networking features, a gorgeous 3.2' touchscreen and HSDPA data connectivity, Nokia aims to capture a much wider share of its target market demographics.  The new handset shares the same body dimensions with its Nokia 5800 XpressMusic model just recently released but without WiFi and comes with just a 2 megapixel camera.

While it exudes an unmistakable mix of trendy style with leading-edge techno substance, the 5230 brings full touchscreen feature on a large screen to a new level of affordability.

Feature Set

Running on the proven Symbian S60 platform, the new 5230 handset combines XpressMusic heritage with the social networking features popular with its target market these days.

• It's a basic quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE with 3G with high speed HSDPA/HSUPA support for truly fast surfing, messaging, downloading and social networking.

• It sports an expansive 3.2-inch TFT LCD touchscreen with VGA (640 by 480) resolution that is unique for an entry level budget handset.  A full-screen QWERTY keypad appears on its large display when entering text.

• You get a generous 33 hours of music playback on the road in-between battery charging.

• The handset is ported with an industry standard 3.5mm audio output jack so you can use a more capable high fidelity headphone at home.

• There's a MediaBar user interface for swift access to your commonly used apps like YouTube and the Nokia Ovi Store as well as media files like photos, videos and music files.

• There's a new contacts bar interface featuring thumbnails for up to 20 images of your close friends that enable instant access to each and their communications history, email exchanges with you, calls and social media updates.

• It integrates with social networking sites from Facebook to MySpace with instant access and updates right when and where you need it.

• While sporting modest internal memory storage, you get microSD expansion slot for up to 16 GB external memory expansion.

• There's A-GPS navigation aided with the latest aerial images, landmarks in over 300 cities and terrain views on Ovi Maps for both driving and pedestrian navigation.

• A modest 2 megapixel camera completes its imaging feature which, while not something to brag about, does the job for snapping the photos you need to upload to your social sites.  Nothing extravagant like a 5 megapixel camera that will just tie down the uploading bandwidth unnecessarily.

• VGA video recording at film-quality 30 frames per second is supported.

Coming Very Soon

Expected to start shipping in the last quarter of 2009, the Nokia 5230 will be offered with a dazzling array of interchangeable body colors. The fixed front panel color scheme comes in black and white while the back cover can be dressed-up in a choice of yellow, pink, red, blue, silver and dark silver. With all its leading edge features housed in a stylish touchscreen form at a competitive price of '149, the Nokia 5230 is headed as another Nokia winner among its target audience.