Nokia C5-03

The Nokia C5-03 is the successor to the highly popular Nokia 5230 and is a mid-range smartphone. Physically the phone looks and feels very much like the 5230. It's slightly smaller and lighter, but retains a 3.2 inch screen as well as 3 buttons below. The screen is exactly the same as in the 5230 and is the same size as the similarly-priced HTC Wildfire. It's a good size for a phone of this price, although being resistive rather than capacitive it does take a bit of poking to make it respond sometimes.
Now the 5230 was released a whole year before the C5-03, so we were anticipating some significant improvements in the C5-03. But it seems that time is standing still at Nokia. There's little improvement, and some things have actually gone backward. Most gobsmackingly awful is the fact that the C5-03 still uses Symbian Series 60. It's slow, it's unresponsive, it crashes if there's an "r" in the month or a "d" in the day and in combination with the cheap and nasty resistive screen makes for an unpleasant user experience.
The camera has been upgraded to 5 megapixels, but there's still no flash or autofocus. Whilst the aGPS with Ovi Maps goes some way to redeeming the phone, the paltry 40MB of built-in memory and the lack of even video calling makes it look like Nokia are taking the micky with this phone. They're even quoting an extraordinary battery standby of 25 days. Considering that it's powered by a less-than-impressive 1000 mAh battery, we think it'll be more likely to average a few days in the real world.
This is not the worst phone in the world, but it's very mundane. And when you consider that it's priced at around the £150 level (that's three times the price of the almost identical Nokia 5230) you'd be better off considering the HTC Wildfire or perhaps even take a punt on the Samsung Wave with its Super AMOLED screen and HD video. Even the antiquated Nokia 5800 is a better buy.

Features of the Nokia C5-03 include:

• Symbian S60 5th edition smartphone
• 5 megapixel camera with 3x digital zoom
• Video recording at up to 640 x 352 resolution and up to 15 fps, 2x digital video zoom
• Display: Touchscreen, 16.7 million colours, 640 x 360 pixels (3.2 inches) with automatic display rotation and proximity sensor
• Nokia Ovi player (MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA formats)
• FM radio
• Ringtones: MP3 & video ringtones, 64-voice polyphonic ringtones, vibration alert
• A-GPS with Ovi Maps 3.0
• Voice commands: speaker independent dialling and voice commands
• Voice recorder
• Integrated handsfree speaker
• Messaging: SMS, MMS, email (support for IMAP, POP, SMTP) plus attachments, Audio messaging
• Internet: HSCSD, GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA (10.2 Mbps), XHTML web browser
• Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR, USB, 3.5 mm audio jack
• Memory: 40MB plus microSD memory card slot (up to 16 GB supported)
• Offline mode
• 3G plus quadband GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)
• Size: 106 x 51 x 13.8 mm
• Weight: 93g
• Battery: 1000 mAh
• Talktime: up to 11.7 hours
• Battery standby: 600 hours