Nokia C5-03 Review

It wasn't long ago when Nokia launched its new line-up of phones, the C-Series. Currently being the most dominant cell phone manufacturer, Nokia has already released quite a number of successful phones to this series, and has also just announced its latest addition to it, the C5-03. Now, it must be noted that the Nokia C5-03 is not to be confused with the previously released Nokia C5. In short, the device has quite some neat features which are simple to use but covers all of the essentials for modern-day phones and at the same time comes at an affordable price.

In terms of design, the C5-03 looks very stylish and comes in a number of vibrant & variant colours.

The C5-03 features a neat 3.2 inch TFT resistive touchscreen which features a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels. Although this display can't exactly match up to the ones on the latest smartphones today, but should be sufficient for the average user. There is also a Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate and Proximity sensor for auto turn-off.

The depressing part though, is that the operating system on the Nokia C5-03 is Symbian ^1 aka S60 5th edition touch edition. Nokia has already pushed some of their other smartphones to Symbian ^3, and is it hence disappointing that they did not do the same with the C5-03. Despite that, there's Nokia Messaging pre-installed, Mail for Exchange support, Ovi Mail, Ovi Store and Ovi Music Integration. Millions of other supported applications are also available from the Ovi Store.

The new C5-03 flaunts an impressive 5 Mega Pixel Camera, but it is of fixed focus and there is no flash to accompany it. The Image quality is what we can come to expect from an average 5 Mega Pixel Camera. A very nifty feature that's available though is Geo-tagging. Apart from images, video Recording is supported at an not so impressive resolution of 640x480 at 15 frames per second and save them in H.263 or MPEG-4 formats. Yet again, the lack of flash shows, as the video recording isn't exactly in top notch quality, even for the supported resolution.

Storage wise, the C5-03 is impressive for a phone with mid-range features. There's only 40MB of internal user memory, but there is a Micro SD card slot, hence it makes the memory expandable up to 16 GB with Micro SD Cards.

The Biggest Surprize is with the battery life. Nokia has outdone themselves in this department by offering a 1000 mAh battery to a phone that has controlled and limited battery consumption. The result is an extremely long standby time of up to 24-25 days. And a talk time of 11.5 hours on 2G networks and 5 hours on 3G networks.

Nokia has managed to offer quite some connectivity options on the C5-03 with support for quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, tri-band 3G with HSDPA (10.2Mbps) and HSUPA (2Mbps), A-GPS and Bluetooth 2.0.

Priced at a surprisingly affordable $237, the Nokia C5-03 is sure sell like hotcakes when it releases towards the end of this year. It might not be able to compete with the other smartphones in the market, but it definitely might be just the cheapest smartphone out there, with all the essential features.