Nokia 5233: Full touch music phone targeted at youth

Here I come again with another mobile phone review. This time it’s not a phone which costs a bomb, which you can’t think of buying! It’s Nokia 5233, a full touch phone running on Symbian S60 5th edition.

Nokia 5233 sports 3.2 inch touch screen, 2MP camera, 3.5 mm audio jack, 70 mb internal memory & external (microSD) expandable upto 16GB. Touch is pretty good & responsive but better with stylus than fingers. I always ended up typing wrong words even after using the phone for a week full time! Anyway that also depends on personal choices, I don’t really like typing on a touch screen.

Home screen has contacts widget, music player controls & application shortcuts. Contacts widget is like a fast dial, u can add contacts which you keep calling again & again. Clicking on a contact here pops up recent activity done with that contact like messaging, call logs. You can also add an RSS feed to contact & track! (I used Friendfeed RSS feed of my friend). Application shortcuts can also be configured based on your requirement.

Though it has a 2MP camera, you can take descent pictures from it. Music quality is comparable to any other music phone in market. Since it supports upto 16GB of external memory, you can store hell lot of music in it. 3.5 mm audio jack gives you an opportunity of using ear phones of your choice.

Since the phone runs on Symbian S60 5th edition, almost all the symbian apps which are there in market will work. When it comes to phone, availability of apps is one the major considerations for me. All major symbian apps like Gravity, Fring, Nimbuzz, Google Maps…etc work on Nokia 5233.

What’s not there?

Well, it’s important to know what’s not there before going for a phone. Nokia 5233 doesn’t have 3G, GPS & Wireless. It is really impossible to put them all into such a low priced phone. Decision is yours, you know better what you need. If you really need those features, I suggest go for Nokia 5800. I heard 5800 is much better after recent firmware update.

How Much?

I have been to my cousin’s marriage last week & did a small research with the phone! I asked around 13-15 people “What could be the price of this phone?”. Most of them said it’s around 20k!! Yeah, it looks like that! But the MRP of the phone is Rs.7,999, should be less in showrooms.

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Airtel is getting more competitive in it’s GPRS offerings by offering one more GPRS pack at very affordable price. My friend Ashwin posted a screenshot sometime back which says about this new pack:

So, as per the screenshot if you easy recharge with Rs.19, you can browse free till 200MB. Though it’s unclear how much validity it carries. If you know, do let everyone know via comment section.

Update:

As Chaitu commented here, validity of this plan is 3 days.

Airtel has recently rolled out a new GPRS pack which is very competitive with GPRS packs offered by new providers like Docomo. With new plan user gets unlimited browsing all through the month for just Rs.98. Though Airtel calls it “unlimited”, it comes with fair usage policy limit of 2Gb. If you are using GPRS only on mobile device, 2Gb is more than enough for a month. If you are connecting your laptop or PC to browse internet, then you should be counting on those bits!

To get this plan, just “Easy Recharge” with Rs.98. But, before that activate Mobile Office on your number. To do that dial *567*11# & you will get a confirmation message. Dialing this activates basic plan of Mobile Office, which is 30paise/50kb, pay as you browse. After you ERecharge with Rs.98, it overrides the basic plan & you will get 2Gb of free browsing. It’s instant

If you don’t have settings send ALL to 543210

Update:

To check your usage details & expiry date of the pack dial *123*10#

Tata Docomo has announced five new GPRS packs as follows:

-To pull internet settings please sms “INTERNET” to 52270 and save them as default settings on your mobile

-To get Recharge Instruction for all packs: Call 12526(toll free) OR Dial *135*<pin># OK

-To activate the Rs. 5/- Daily Pass,  SMS  ”GPRS” to 121

-For more information on the TATA DOCOMO GPRS Packs visit:  www.tatadocomo.com/gprs.aspx

Google has announced it’s own phone “Nexus One”. Following are the key features of the phone:

• Powerful 1GHz SnapDragon processor
• 3.7 inch AMOLED touch screen
• 512MB of RAM
• 512MB of ROM (Internal Memory)
• MicroSD slot expandable up to 32GB
• 5 Mega Pixel camera
• Google Android OS
• GPS, Google Maps
• Accelerometer, Light sensor & proximity sensor
• Active Noise Cancellation for clear calls
• Google Earth debuting on this handset & will be available to other Android devices soon via Android App Market

Nexus One is priced at USD 529 & not yet available in India. Check out the phone at http://www.google.com/phone.

Airtel has two unlimited GPRS packs for it’s prepaid customers. One day pack offers you unlimited browsing all the day for Rs.20. Similarly you can go for weekly pack for Rs.99 & do unlimited browsing throughout the week. Getting these packs activated is quite simple via SMS shortcodes as follows:

• To activate daily pack (Rs.20), send MO to 56123
• To activate weekly pack (Rs.99)  send MO to 56122

Since I’m not an Airtel user, I don’t know more about other GPRS packs Airtel is offering. If you are aware of any, please share it with others in comments section.

Nokia has launched it’s new touch phone 5230 in Bangalore. This phone is mainly targeted at youth who love to listen to music. Nokia 5230 features 3.2 inch touch screen with dedicated music control buttons, 2MP camera, 70MB internal memory, microSD slot expandable upto 16GB. Nokia 5230 runs on Symbian S60 5th edition & that opens up doors to huge number of apps for the device. MRP of the phone is Rs.8,499, yeah I was shocked too! It’s pretty affordable & value for money I should say.

Check out the launch event video happened at Garuda mall, Bangalore:

When it comes to E series phones everyone thinks about messaging, IM, office suite & other serious stuff! But E72 has a twist, it has got really good camera built into it, which previous E-series phones lacked. So, let me show how good E72’s 5 Mega Pixel camera is with photographs taken in different modes & lighting conditions.

Day to Day photography:

Found something interesting while traveling? Just take out your phone & click! No options, no modes selected. I saw a bus stop in the car mirror while commuting, just took out the phone & clicked!

As you can see the image clarity & details are really good. No wonder if posts to my Posterous has increased these days!

Close Up:

This scene mode is used to capture objects in 10 to 60 cms of distance. Collected those thumb drives in different Nokia events

Landscape:

Bangalore race course captured in landscape mode.

Night Landscape:

As you can see, capturing night landscape isn’t that great from E72. The picture isn’t clear & blurry. N97’s camera performed really better in similar lighting conditions.

Night Photography (normal closer objects):

Woke up of a bad dream in the mid night! Just to divert my mind, took the phone & blindly clicked this pic. There was absolutely no light in my room when I clicked this one. This also proves how brilliant the flash is on E72.

Backlight (Pointing at a light source):

First one, the sunset, though it looks brilliant, cam is unable to capture all the colors in it. Second pic looks really nice.

Video Recording:


Captured this video from the window of a fast moving bus covering Bangalore city corporation’s wall project initiative.

Conclusion:

Overall, camera of Nokia E72 is as good as an entry level digital camera. If you are a person who wants to capture those wonderful moments as it happens, this is just perfect for you. Inbuilt email client & share online features of the phone enables you to share those moments right-away with friends & family. I’m really loving it, god save my mobile internet bill!!!

You might be also interested in what all I liked about this phone.

I had been to Nokia developer conference few weeks back. Met lot of interesting people there, shared ideas, it was fun. I also met Mayank there & got to know about SMStweet which he built. SMStweet enables user to post Tweets via SMS. To use this service just go to SMStweet.in & sign in using Twitter. This service uses Twitter oAuth & hence doesn’t store your twitter login information. After authenticating with twitter, give your mobile number to SMStweet & start using the service right away.

Send TWT YourTweet to 09220092200 or 09243000111 to post a tweet. If your tweet gets posted successfully, you will receive a response message containing latest @reply made to you.

Tweeting is fun when you share your experiences right away. Once I tweeted from middle of a river! SMSTweet just enables you to do it! No need of a GPRS connection, no need of a fancy device, all you need is a mobile phone & every mobile phone supports SMS (Do I have to say that?). I also find SMStweet useful to post interesting forwarded SMSs to Twitter!

I couldn’t wait too long to express my opinion about Nokia E72!! So, here is a quick post!

• Powerful: With ARM 11 600 MHz processor, it is really powerful. It’s been two days of massive usage & it hasn’t hung or crashed a single time
• Camera: E-Series phone with 5 MPix camera!!? Pics are brilliant & makes me think to start a new photo blog! Will post few pictures taken from it in a short while.
• Smooth UI: Though it’s the same old Symbian S60 3rd edition OS, UI is very different from other E-series phones like E63, E66, E71. The new UI is very smooth & has got cool transition effects.
• Form Factor: Ultra slim & metallic finish gives a very good feeling when I keep it in my hand, and makes it fully comfortable to type on QWERTY keyboard.
• Runs for long!: It really has got a huge battery, it ran straight two days with ‘always online’ email, random music listening, many app downloads from OVI store & all!
• Music: I can hear!! I can hear that difference in music when compared to my old E-series phone E66. And also E72 has 3.5 mm audio jack which lets you plug any earphone of your choice!
• Optical Navi Key: Initially was making mistakes in menu selections because of Optical Navi key, after a day, I’m so much used to it. Turned the sensitivity of it to ‘High’!!
• Blink!: A small thing, the blink from that d-pad makes me feel I have a living being in my hand. It blinks faster when there are unchecked SMSs or missed calls!!

That’s it for now! Let me know what you think about it in comment section.