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Nokia C5-03 budget touchscreen smartphone

Pocket friendly in more ways than one

Finnishing touch

Powering the C5-03 is a 600MHz ARM 11 processor with 128MB of RAM. That may not sound like much but Symbian^1 doesn't need much CPU grunt and the result is an OS that positively zips along. The UI is pleasantly fluid too with no stalls, hiccoughs or hesitations. Fire up the picture gallery though and things do slow down with thumbnail previews of large image galleries taking a noticeably long time to load.

Nokia C5-03

Touch typing

Inherent limitations aside, this latest version of S60 has had a few improvements applied to it. It now features smoother and more reliable kinetic scrolling and consistently uses a single-tap rather than a mixture of single and double to launch apps and open files.

The resistive panel isn't a complete deal-breaker either. Of course you won't mistake the C5 for an iPhone 4 or Nexus S but the touch-screen still reacts smartly to taps and the landscape virtual keyboard is a nice bit of design, so messaging and typing aren't a problem. Hold the phone in portrait though and you have to make do with a virtual numeric keypad.

The web browsing capabilities of the C5-03 leave something to be desired. While the standard browser supports Java and YouTube video, text doesn't re-flow, which means that zooming in can be a clunky and frustrating experience. Videos also take a long time to load. Using Opera Mini improves matters but this is still one area in which Symbian is lagging far, far behind Android, iOS and the rest of the band.

Nokia C5-03

Charges from the 2mm socket and the micro USB interface

The installed social network apps compare poorly to what's available for the smartphone competition and though you can rummage around in the Ovi Store the selection of apps is nothing like as broad or interesting as it is in the Apps Store or Android Market.

Nokia C5 03
Next page: Basic skills

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