Nokia’s Symbian-powered C5 smartphone runs Symbian S60v3, so fits in with the manufacturer’s stated plan to continue using the smartphone operating system in its mid-range phones.
The phone comes with 2.2-inch QVGA, it sports a 3.2MP camera with autofocus and LED flash, GPS receiver with A-GPS, a microSD card slot to expand the 50MB of built-in memory.
The C5's specs suggest it is likely to enter the market at the lower end and offer advanced apps and connectivity to those on a budget. Nokia is likely to be announcing the C5 and its little brother the C3 later in the month at the Mobile World Conference 2010.
As a reminder, the C5 is a low-cost smartphone with specs that include HSPA connectivity, GPS, 3.2-megapixel camera and Symbian S60. Its MSRP is just $185, hence we expect to see the Finnish company moving tons of these in due course.
And if you wonder, we’ve no idea when the U.S. version of the device will be released, if at all. If I were at AT&T or T-Mobile, I would love the idea of offering a low-cost smartphone, so at the end we may see one of these two going for the C5 in an effort to increase ARPUs.
Finally, we also don’t know when the Nokia C6, which was also approved by the Commission recently, will be officially announced. That model looks even more interesting, not least thanks to the WiFi connectivity support…
The C5 sports 2.2inch QVGA display, which has the resolution of 320 x 240 pixels and supports 16 million colors. The image quality is average and sun legibility is very poor. We don’t have any gripes with it, taking price as consideration.
The buttons are really nice. The buttons are large, well made and offer proper travel and well feed back. The typing is very easy on this alphanumeric keyboard. The qwerty keyboard could have been still great. The navigation array include 5 way Navigational toggle, two soft keys, a Call, end, clear and application keys.
The 3.5mm audio jack, microUSB ports and charger are on the top side of the device. The battery cover is made from metal and easy to remove. A volume rocker and a microSD card slot are present on the right spine.
It also features Nokia Messaging support that handles multiple email accounts with ease. You can quickly switch between the email accounts directly within the application. It supports popular email accounts like Gmail, Ovi Mail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, Windows Live and other email accounts. The C5 is nicely integrated with various social networking sites like Facebook, Hi5, Youtube, MySpace and Twitter. It also supports Instant Messaging for Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger, and “Windows Live Messenger”. The C5’s web browser supports full HTML and Flash lite v3.1.
Camera
Like Nokia 5630 XpressMusic, the Nokia C5 is also equipped with 3.2 megapixel camera with flash and Full focus. In Full focus, the technology ensures the objects will remain in focus. The interface include 4x zoom, panorama mode, color tones, manual exposure settings, scene modes, Photo editor, simple video editor, light sensitivity modes, Red Eye Removal, and White Balance. It can shoot 640×480 pixel videos at 15fps.
The image is quite good. The images look bright, crisp and colorful with good detail. The video quality is average with less bright. The Flash is not strong enough to take good pictures in dark conditions.
It has 50MB of internal memory and you can add microSD card up to 16GB.