Nokia 5233

 

Touchscreen smartphone on a tight budget

 

 

 

Good design; fits well in your palm, good touchscreen response, excellent audio quality (headphones), full-fledged smartphone OS with multi-tasking ability, very well priced

Build quality unsatisfactory, smallish display has poor sunlight visibility, bare bones in terms of features and bundle 

When Nokia decided to enter the mainstream touchscreen phone market, they decided to do so with the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. Back then the market was ruled by much more expensive phones like the Apple iPhone and the LG Viewty. In comparison, the low price and good features of the 5800 made it an instant hit. Today, however, the game has changed significantly; you can buy a touchscreen phone from your pocket change!
In order to compete with the new batch of low-priced touchscreen phones, such as the Samsung Corby series, Nokia has now released two new smartphones, the Nokia 5230 and the Nokia 5233. The 5230 lacks the 3.2 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi, stereo speakers and the high capacity memory card of the 5800, whereas the 5233 goes a couple of steps further and loses the 3G and GPS as well, for an even lower price tag. Today we will be reviewing the cheapest touchscreen phone that Nokia has produced till date - the Nokia 5233.  

Note: Since the only difference between the 5230 and the 5233 is the lack of 3G and GPS in the latter, a lot that has been said here also holds true for the 5230 as well.  

Bundle

• Nokia 5233
• Battery
• Charger
• Headset
• Lanyard with plectrum stylus
• User Guide

The bundle of the 5233 is completely stripped of anything that might even seem like luxury. There is no memory card, no carry case, and worse of all, no USB cable. Now you know how they managed to price the phone so low.  

In comparison, however, the Samsung Corby comes with a 2GB card, USB cable, in-ear earphones and a carry case for around the same price as the 5233.  


Design & Construction 

The Nokia 5233 looks identical to the 5800, except for the color scheme. Where the 5800 had the traditional XpressMusic red and blue color stripes running on its sides, the 5233 is content with just plain old grey. 

The front side of the phone is sunken into the casing, possibly to prevent accidental presses on the resistive touchscreen. On the top are the earpiece, display light sensor and the proximity sensor on its right, along with the shortcut button for launching commonly used apps such as the music player, gallery, web browser, etc. Below the 3.2" display are the call/end keys with the menu key in the centre. 

On the right side of the phone we can find the volume control keys on the top, the sliding phone lock key in the middle and the camera shutter key at the bottom. 

On the left side are the SIM card slot and the microSD card slot in the middle. The SIM card slot, although on the outside, requires the battery to be removed in order to slide the card out, which otherwise is inaccessible. Also, if a card is inserted when the phone is switched on, the phone does not recognize it and a restart is required. The microSD card slot is thankfully free of such inanities and can be accessed without having to remove the battery. The phone can take up to 16 GB of memory cards but none is provided with the phone. Also seen near the bottom is the single loudspeaker.

 
Display 

The Nokia 5233 comes with a 3.2" 360 x 640 pixel, 16M color TFT LCD. The display utilizes a resistive touchscreen layer on top of it. The display picture quality is pretty decent indoors, however, the display gets washed out considerably under the sun. Also, although the display resolution is quite high, the display size isn't so. This means the text looks too small on the phone's screen, such as in the web browser. 

The response of the resistive touchscreen is really good and is one of the better resistive touchscreens that I've used. Even a light touch suffices to register an input on the screen. The phone also complements the touch with a nice vibration feedback, which is spot on and the best that I've come across, unlike the horrible buzzing found on Samsung and LG touchscreen phones. Since the display is sunk into the casing, using the scroll bar on the right side of the screen is a pain.   

UI & Applications 

The Nokia 5233 runs on Symbian S60 5th Edition operating system. This makes it a full-fledged smartphone, unlike the other phones in this segment. You can install additional native Symbian or Java applications, games or themes and you also get the ability to multitask between them. You can just press and hold the menu key and the phone will show you all the currently running applications, so you could switch between them or close them as you wish.

This makes the 5233 far more productive than the other phones, like the Corby or the Samsung Star. You can now chat with your friend in one application, browse the web in the browser and listen to music, all at once without closing any of the applications. Plus, in the middle if you want to, say, go to the calendar, you can just press the menu button to minimize the apps and go to the main menu and then go to the calendar, with all your apps running in the background. 

Unfortunately, the S60 5th Edition UI is far from being user-friendly and takes a while to get used to. However, Nokia has included kinetic scrolling in this phone but unlike the N97 mini it is not available in the main menu but only in lists. Here you have to use the scroll bar on the side, which unfortunately is not so easy, since the display is sunk into the casing. Users will also get confused as to why you have to single press to select certain items in the menu but double click elsewhere. The settings menu is also a wonderfully complex maze of options, rivaled only by the Control Panel on the Windows operating system on the PC in terms of complexity and how hard it is to find something. 

The phone comes with very few applications built-in and you would only find the very basic that a Symbian phone can have. You can download more apps and install them yourself from elsewhere or from the built-in Ovi Store, which, however, offers very limited options as of now. There is also Ovi Maps built-in but since the phone does not have built-in GPS, it cannot show your exact location. We observed that the application took too long to download map information over EDGE connection and that Google Maps was much faster in comparison.

The Nokia 5233 runs on a 434 MHz ARM 11 processor. In our testing we observed that the phone never particularly felt fast, and was just about acceptable when it came to the speed of the UI. It is a definite improvement over the speed of the older 5800 XpressMusic (before it got the firmware upgrade) and on par with the other phones in this segment, but we would have liked to see a faster interface on the phone.  


Connectivity

The Nokia 5233 is a quad band GSM handset. It also supports GPRS and EDGE, along with Bluetooth 2.0 and USB 2.0 connectivity. That, however, is the extent of the connectivity options available on the phone. There is no 3G, HSDPA, Wi-Fi or GPS, but then that is expected for such a low priced handset. If you want 3G and GPS, spend some more and get the 5230 instead. If you want Wi-Fi but don't mind losing 3G, then get the 5530 XpressMusic. If you want it all, then get the 5800 XpressMusic. 

Call quality and network reception strength was fine on the phone. But we noticed that the small earpiece hole on the phone could easily be blocked by your ear, thus reducing the strength of the audio output. You would then have to adjust your ear so that it doesn't block the speaker. The loudspeaker strength was average and not quite up to the mark. 

The Nokia 5233 has a pretty decent messaging application that supports SMS, MMS as well as emails. Text entry can be accomplished through three methods; alphanumeric keypad, QWERTY keypad and handwriting recognition. The alphanumeric keypad is pretty decent if you intend to type with just one hand. If you want to type with both then the full QWERTY keypad makes more sense.

It is pretty spacious and much more usable than what we have seen on Samsung and LG touchscreen phones. However, it cannot match the keypad on the iPhone. The handwriting recognition is surprisingly usable and the software can recognize entire words and not just single characters. The recognition is also pretty accurate. Eight out of ten times it guesses the correct character for the one you entered. Whichever method you select, the 5233 offers you a fairly good messaging experience for a touchscreen phone. 

The web browser on the 5233 is based on the WebKit engine, the same one that powers Safari and Chrome on the PC and Mobile Safari on the iPhone. Also, the browser is quite good on paper, but in practice it fails to impress. Scrolling isn't smooth and you often end up accidentally selecting some link or the other when you try to move on the webpage. The screen size is also not very large and the high resolution means everything looks a bit tiny on the screen. The lack of 3G or Wi-Fi also means that you have to rely on EDGE as the fastest means of getting data on to your phone, which usually involves a lot of waiting. I would suggest you avoid using the built-in browser and instead use Opera Mobile or Opera Mini, as you not only get more features but also because these browsers perform better than the built-in browser. 


Multimedia

The Nokia 5233 comes with a very basic 2 megapixel camera. There is no autofocus or a flash. The camera software seems to be carried over from the 5230, which explains the presence of the option to geo-tag the images. The image quality of the phone is pretty basic. Images taken outdoors during the day come out fairly well but only when seen on the phone's display. At night the small sensor just cannot capture enough light and the lack of flash makes things worse. The video recording quality too is mediocre. 

The music playback capabilities are mostly carried over from the 5800 XpressMusic, save for the stereo speakers. You have the same old music player; not particularly great but not bad as well. It has a 3.5mm headphone jack, so you can connect any headphones of your choice. When we tested the phone with our earphones, the 5233 gave us excellent audio quality. The volume level with the smaller earphones was more than enough but with the larger headphones we found ourselves reaching the limits of the phone's audio output sooner than we would have liked. Still overall the audio quality of the 5233 left us mighty impressed. Just don't use the supplied earphones though, they are terrible. The loudspeaker too isn't particularly great, neither in quality nor loudness. 
The 5233 also has a built-in FM radio. The radio supports RDS, so it can display information that the radio stations transmit, such as track title, etc. The reception strength of the radio was decent and the interface looked attractive due to the large scrolling fonts in the application interface. 

The images and videos can be viewed from the Gallery. The Gallery collects all the images and videos and puts them in one folder, which can be annoying, especially when you have made separate folders on the memory card to save different albums. I transferred some full HD (1920 x 1080) images to the phone to see how the phone handles them. The Gallery is also a bit slow with high resolution images. The generation of the thumbnail takes ages and the phone generally acts retarded while the thumbnails are being made.  

Opening the images also takes a while and so does moving from one image to another. You can move between images by swiping your finger on the screen, but there is no pinch to zoom like in the iPhone due to the lack of multi-touch. Instead you get a zoom bar on the left side of the screen to select the level of zooming you want. After zooming you can pan across the image. 
As far as video playback is concerned, the 5233 had a very restricted format support and the bit rate and resolution also had to be under strict control for the video to play. In my opinion it would be best to avoid the built-in player completely and just use something like the Core Player for playing media files, as the format support is much larger in the latter. The display could have been bigger for watching videos comfortably.  

Battery Life

The Nokia 5233 has a 1320 mAh Li-Ion battery. Considering there is no major battery hogging feature in the phone, such as 3G, Wi-Fi or GPS, the 5233 comfortable lasts for around two days on a single charge. This includes calling, messaging, web browsing and music playback through headphones. The Nokia 5230, however, won't last that long though.  

Verdict

The Nokia 5233 is priced at Rs. 7,800. Add about a thousand bucks more and you can get the 5230 model instead. The phone is priced very well and for that money not only are you getting a full touchscreen phone but also a complete smartphone, with application support and the ability to multi-task. 

We cannot shake off the feeling that a lot has been lost in a bid to keep the phone's cost as low as possible. The phone has been built on a strict budget. The phone is completely stripped of any worthwhile features that one can think of and even the bundle is barebones. The build quality of the handset too seemed a bit on the flimsy side and in comparison the Samsung handsets feel a lot better.

However, if you are willing to overlook these problems, then the Nokia 5233 is a really good option. One that will let you do a lot more than the Corby, the Star or the Cookie can do at a similar price.