Battleangel | Personal

So, I picked up a Nokia 5230 at a sale. I was curious about the Symbian system, and we needed a new phone anyway. After much consideration I concluded that even a bare bones smart phone would be better than any old dumb phone that you could get for the same price. As for myself I’ll keep using my old Sony Ericsson T310 until there is an affordable Android alternative with all the hardware kinks worked out.

Impressions of the 5230: Great value. One sixth or so of the price of an Iphone 3GS. No powerhouse or multimedia wonder though. And applications can be dodgy.

Caveats when compared to most smart phones, like its bigger brother the 5800 include the lack of WLAN, stereo speakers, front facing camera, autofocus and a decent camera. Also, Nokia should have kept the stylus from the 5800.

It should also be noted that none of Nokia’s current HVGA phones have any sort of graphics acceleration whatsoever. As is painfully evident over at GLBenchmark. The only HVGA Nokia phone that makes any sort of impression is the upcoming N8. Their older QVGA phones are obviously useless and the current HVGA phones, like the 5230, 5800, N97 and X6 can only muster about 70 frames (using only the CPU) whereas the N8 does 905 frames, iPhone 4 1016 frames and most of the new and upcoming Samsung phones manage 1400 – 1600 frames.

One other drawback of the 5230 specifically is its lacklustre home screen. So far anyway it hasn’t been given the widget enabled screen of the 5800 and N97. You can make things a little nicer by running widgetizer but in the end you’re still going to waste that big beautiful touch screen.

And on a side note, the file system is completely nonsensical. If you decide to add files manually, there is no hint as to where to place them. And all your music and videos will show up on your ring tone selection screen. Just like ring tones will show up in the native mp3 player. There are a number of workarounds, but neither is altogether successful.

On the plus side we have free turn-by-turn navigation via Ovi maps and the apparently free Nokia Mail which checks up to ten email accounts and delivers the result to your phone at regular intervals.

Custom firmwares and hacking are ever expanding fields. I quickly found that hacking the phone was all but inevitable. Signing applications yourself is just too much work. Plus, using custom firmwares enables enables a few system hacks that would otherwise be impossible as long as the OS is running. Overall the modding community is fairly active and helpful.

Applications: There are a quite a few good applications for the platform. Almost everything you need is there. For instance: Ovi maps / Google maps / Garmin (discontinued?), Foreca Weather, Truecaller, Skype, Nimbuzz, Fring, Sports Tracker / Endomondo, Opera / Skyfire, Nokia mail, Gravity, Quick Office, Adobe Reader, PowerMP3, Quickmark barcode reader etc etc. The most useful app so far has without a doubt been Sports Tracker.

Warez: Warez is quite abundant, even if a select few applications remain without a viable crack. Some are obviously hopeless since they rely on a central server. But you’d be surprised by what you can find. Most notorious sites include: OPDA, Noeman, Symbiantalk, Nokiasoftware and Dotsis.

Bypassing Ovi Store: Why waste your monthly quota if you don’t have to? There is a simple trick for downloading software directly to your PC and then use the software suite to install them. Just change your browser user agent!

PC software suite: There are actually two to choose from. The "Ovi Suite" and the "PC suite". The former is very sleek but bulky and buggy and might in time replace the latter. Both offer easy and fast backup and editing of calendar and messages.

Games: Good games are scarce and sluggish thanks to the lack of acceleration. They are also held back by the somewhat unresponsive touch screen which is otherwise quite competent. I hope you like solitaire because you’ll be playing it a lot! There are a few others like MicroPool, MicroMaze, Airport, Sky Force Reloaded, Gears etc, but overall games are a mix of sad Java games and games that don’t run or don’t run very well. I’ve probably installed a hundred games or so and removed eighty of them.

As for the future, I’ve pretty much canned the idea of getting a used 5800. I think the N8, once it sinks well below its RRP, and IF software development ramps up, could be an alternative. But Symbian has an uphill battle here, and backward compatibility is questionable. Symbian may have a big heritage of applications, however most of them are sucky old 2005 versions that especially in the case of games can’t do full screen or aren’t even touch screen enabled. Meanwhile Android is a rising star, and Samsung is encouraging Bada development, plus Microsoft is about to join the match again. Could be a hard sell for Nokia to convince developers to code for Symbian^3. On the other hand, there is said to be 300.000 QT developers that may or may not code for the platform. And Symbian sold a rather mindboggling 27 million devices in Q2 2010. So while it has a miniscule market share in the US, the rumours of its demise may be exaggerated somewhat by American snot-nosed iphone kiddies. Just think about it, Blackberry and Windows Mobile still hold considerable chunks of the market there. Have you ever heard something as ludicrous.

Obviously, if at all possible, I’d like to jump on the Android bandwagon. But it’s all a question of cost … and the state of the warez scene. Android is just now coming into full bloom so we’ll have to see where it ends up.