Nokia C5-03 budget touchscreen smartphone With touchscreen smartphones all the rage, handsets with a decent spec and a 3in or larger screen are now filtering down to PAYG packages priced at around £100. For that sort of money you don't have a huge choice - the Orange San Francisco, Samsung Europa and Sony Ericsson X10 Mini stand out as the few worth considering. The …
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...and you get quite a lot.
Specifically, good call quality, long battery life, a good enough UI and operating system, some nice features.
You don't get an app store full of fluff for the hard of thinking, it doesn't cost you £500, and fanbois (most shades of) won't want you in their club.
It just gets better.
I know it's currently trendy to diss Nokia, but come on, what happened to function over form?
Disclaimer: I own and love my 5800, running the same OS, I think. And in cold weather I can keep my gloves on in cold weather, because it's got a resistive screen.
For you a resistive screen is fine. Lovely.
I personally have hated each and every phone I have played with which had a resistive screen.
Each to their own I suppose.
Yet again I would personally prefer an app store filled with huge amounts of crud, compared with an app store filled with empty space.
Dissing Nokia when it's falling further and further behind it's competition is allowed I would have thought.
Personally I like Nokia's hardware, but wouldn't trust their UI department/software testers to be left in charge of not sticking their pencils in their own eyes.
Having recently checked it out, with support from at least EA, Gameloft and Rovio many of the same big name games that tend to dominate the other app stores seemed to be present on the Nokia. That said, I'm still acting under the impression that increased developer support is a good thing.
Vodafone is offering the X10 Mini on PAYG for £130 and the Orange San Francisco is available for £100 PAYG which makes them both realistic alternatives to the C5-03 for any potential smartphone buyer on a budget.
http://shop.vodafone.co.uk/shop/mobile-phone/sony-ericsson-x10-mini-payg
http://shop.orange.co.uk/mobile-phones/San-Francisco-from-Orange-in-grey
I've got a Nokia 5800 and I'm trying out the Orange San Francisco (sounds like a bargain on the face of it at £100 with a good res screen). The android OS is great but a rogue app is using data (after doing a factory reset it's OK - I'm wondering if it's Facebook which I can't un-install as it's a "system" app! - this time I didn't sign into it). The build quality is worse. And there's an issue with it forgetting about the SIM card. I had to install the "blade wifi fix" app to sort out a Wifi problem. The sat nav is on-line so no use when I'm on holiday and Google don't cover as many countries as Ovi anyway. it's also very basic in comparison.
Even if I spent a bit more on a better android phone, I'd then be into the no battery life issue. Two guys at work leave theirs plugged in permanently when they're at home or at their desk!
I'm not sure why I want android other than everyone else has one and it looks prettier. Being a geek I like the idea of the linux command line and clever apps but on the other hand, I do need a phone that works as a phone (and occasional sat nav) and doesn't cost more than a laptop.
The bundled Google Sat Nav app is on-line (mostly, there's some caching which will help on a short drive to the shops, but not a holiday to Greece) but there's a plethora of paid and free apps that'll do a similar job off-line if you're roaming abroad.
If you're geek enough to like the idea of a linux command line then get yourself to the Modaco forum and flash their custom ROM for the ZTE Blade. It used to be fiddly but it's really point and click at this stage. No bother at all for any Register reader and takes off a few of the rough edges and adds some geeky features like Samba shares and extra VPN support to the kernel.
I'd be interested if anyone knows which app "Anonymous Coward" was talking about as I've never found a free off-line sat nav app for Android. Tried Skobbler and Waze but they are on-line.
Ovi maps is the killer app for me so if there's an alternative, I'd be interested to know. I know Google is moving that way but as pointed out, not good enough for a holiday (not that they cover Greece anyway for voice navigation).
I wouldn't mind too much paying for a decent sat nav app as a one off expense but then paying £30 or whatever each time I go to a different country for the maps? I'll stick with Ovi for now.
Let's not forget the extra £10-15 to unlock it, if you want to run a budget phone on a budget PAYG network. Making it nearly twice the price of an unlocked San Francisco (free unlock available).
Unless you really want to pay more in call charges than you did for the phone in a frighteningly short time.
It's unfortunate for Nokia, Android is redefining what 'budget' means.
this is very orange SF like - its base and can be bought through tesco direct for those of us who dont like the idea of using cards over the net. Mine was for droid development but apart from the camera and battery issues I like it enough to carry around with me to meetings and it sits on my desk every day - plugged into a spare USB port :-)
You can stick a 16GB mSD in it (mine came from novatech who are just brill as usual).
I did have to reformat the card to get it to work but was done with a Windows box - I did not have to stick ext2fs on it :-)
Unlock is free and if you move to giffgaff you get free net and texts and a wadge of minutes for 10ukp. No tethering allowed but I can live with that. This eliminates the data use issue - which is a NIGHTMARE on VF - the racer cost me 1UKP/hour on VF which was very suspect because my credit was dropping even when I had the phone powered off!
Jacqui
It still does not have a price listed on mobilefun, but I would expect it to be in the sub 160 quid price bracket.
In any case, with Experia X10 mini (with OS upgrade) and C7 being only a few tenners away I do not see what the point of this phone is.
Nokia is once again showing that it is a portfolio driven company. Lots of portfolio products that have marginal differences with products overstepping each other's target audiences. It is basically carpet bombing the market instead of targeting specifically the actual segments with 5-6 well designed products.
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