The Nuron (Nokia Nuron 5230) is a Symbian OS 9.4 smartphone running Nokia’s S60 5th Edition software. If you’re already a Nokia S60 user, you’ll likely feel right at home, even if you’ve never used the touch screen 5th Edition version. The icons, menus and metaphors are largely the same. That’s great for familiarity, but the user interface still isn’t ideally touch optimized as it is with the iPhone 3GS and Android (two mobile operating systems that were designed from the ground up for touch rather than being ports of d-pad centric product lines). Since Nokia has released six 5th Edition phones, starting with the high end Nokia N97, we’d hoped they’d have evolved the UI more. But the new ^Symbian phones are coming later this year, and we assume Nokia didn’t want to spend much more development time with S60.
What exactly bothers us? It’s not just the resistive touch screen, which has its good points: you can use it with gloves and fingernails and it’s more precise. Yes, you do have to press a bit harder than on the iPhone or Motorola Cliq XT, but it’s not a wretched task. What we don’t like is that you actually have to use skinny scroll bars in some places, and those are certainly not finger-friendly and are terribly dated. In some cases you have kinetic scrolling and in others you don’t. Since this isn’t a capacitive display, there’s no pinch zooming. In some places you must single-tap on an item and in other places a double-tap is required. Good gosh, these kinds of things should have been sorted out long ago. The on-screen keyboard isn’t the easiest to use, but once you remember it’s not capacitive and that you must pay attention and precisely tap the key you want, it’s passable.
But there are things to like as well: once you get used to how the UI works, it’s easy enough to fly around the screen and get things done. It’s a fun phone to use, though it gets sluggish at times running on an ARM11 434MHz processor with a lean amount of available RAM. The smartphone is compact and very light at 3.98 ounces, and it makes the Cliq XT look like a battleship.
Like the Nokia 5800 and 5230, the phone’s hardware is laid out a bit differently from most phones. Nokia ships the phone with a sticker over the display that lets you know that the SIM card slot and microSD card slots are under rubber doors on the side of the phone instead of under the battery door.
The Nuron has a screen lock slider on the right, a feature common in recent Nokia phones. It’s easy to operate and saves you from the two step touch the power button then slide on the screen to unlock method that we find tedious. There are dedicated hardware call send and end buttons and a center key that opens up the programs window. These are mechanical buttons and work easily. A touch sensitive button lives at the top right corner above the display and this launches a shortcut bar to the multimedia apps. There’s a standard 3.5mm stereo jack up top (music is one of the phone’s strong points) and a dedicated camera button. The volume buttons are on the right and they control everything except ringer volume (you must use the Profiles settings to change the ringer volume which seems a little silly).
As we’ve come to expect from Nokia phones, the Nuron has excellent voice quality and strong reception. If making calls and holding a signal are important to you, the Nuron is definitely a good choice. It has better reception than the Cliq XT and Nexus One Android phones. Again, like most Nokia phones, the Nuron plays well with Bluetooth headsets, car kits and stereo headsets– it’s not finicky in the least. The contacts application is the usual Nokia affair with plenty of fields. The PIM applications sync with Outlook on the desktop, but there’s no iSync plugin (at least not yet). Using the Ovi Store application, you can download Mail for Exchange which supports syncing with MS Exchange 2003 and 2007 as well as Google contacts and calendar.
We’re a bit disappointed that the phone has only 3.6 Mbps 3G HSDPA when most T-Mobile smartphones are now shipping with the faster 7.2 Mbps flavor. The Nuron is a quad band GSM world phone with 3G on T-Mobile’s US 1700/2100MHz bands. It features Nokia’s usual webkit-based web browser that really impressed us 3 years ago but now looks a little weak compared to the Android and iPhone browsers. It’s not bad though and does a good job of rendering desktop sites (and it’s much better than RIM’s BlackBerry web browser). Email comes in the form of Nokia Messaging, which is functional but not sexy. The phone works with POP3, IMAP, Gmail and MS Exchange email (Exchange support is a free download).
Desktop Status Options (You scroll down to get the other settings – desktop is still off, but the wallpaper still fills the page, albeit stuck in landscape)
Sketch App
Notes
It’s promising that there’s so much of the N900 that works well in portrait mode. I love being able to browse in portrait (though it is limited to having no options of opening new window or going back etc) and making calls in portrait but I want more! Specifically music player and messaging. For messaging, S60 5th edition already offers a solution of text entry with T9 alphanumeric.
The hard days have gone. Nokia E63 simplifies the setup wizard for mail access. The speed of the device and qwerty keypad make it the right choice for combined messaging of SMS, MMS and Email. Though its 110MB built-in memory and 2MP camera bring down its tech specification richness, for people who want to catch up with personal and professional Emails on the go it comes at affordable price. It looks like handy but it is the thickest mobile among its successor (E71) and rivals (Motorola Q9H and Samsung Black Jack II). As is typical high end Nokia phones, the image in display is clear enough even under sunlight and provides you the comfortability to use the device without any issues.
variety of the products it cater for each segment of the market. What fascinate me about Nokia is, its products compete among themselves rather than struggling against rival companies. Only with Nokia, I find the motto to stick with the core; Best Signal Strength!!! Best Battery Life!!! Best Price packed with features!!! anything else come second. For sure, they have a very active cell to monitor the needs and responding to them in a way, which suits more to users than the business needs. The same orientation to users and seemingly uncountable phones for each segment keep them steady on their spot.
while I am putting it on the top as this is my main concern and so of most of the users out there (at least in Asian Continent).
discharged cell phone, when required most.
today and your mobile is the closest techy thing with you all the time. Office has some other means of connections, your home has something and cafe, restaurant something else, more of it, you want still to be connected if on some deserted Island. So, as Nokia says “Connecting People”, my choices are
wishes anything lesser than a 3.2” resistive Touch Screen TFT with at least 360 x 640 pixels and at least 16M colors (more is better, but intelligent is to be better on battery and cost), so it does suits to Nokia’s aim for filling market with more touch screen devices by this year. Nokia 5800 had the same and no reason that they cant make another one within same cost.
built-in Digital Compass, but I have seen it in Nokia N97 Mini and Nokia N900 and sure its a very intuitive thing. If could keep it then well.. if not then not insisting, but what’s important is same GPS capability Nokia 5800 or Nokia N97 Mini had and obviously the same free navigation. Possible!!!
Nitish Kumar
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