Nokia C5

Though the C5 looks like a simple basic phone, it really packs a lot of features. Starting with the good stuff - Battery life is exceptional, so much so that I can't remember when I last charged it, maybe once a week at the most? Probably longer! My phone is switched on 24 hours a day and used for texting, calling, checking email daily and using OVI maps a couple of times a week. Other plus points are the large easy to use keys, suited to man size fingers! The phone is very very light, you will never know its in your pocket and is light to hold. While being light it still manages to feel quite well built, though I wouldn't want to drop it down a flight of stairs.

It has a good level of personalisation, you can set up the screen and phone in several different ways and arrange all your most used apps on the home screen. Talking of apps, this is a proper little smart phone (without the touchscreen obviously) and comes installed with loads of apps and you can easily download more from the OVI store. A great feature is the OVI MAPS, which basically has done away with my sat nav! The mapping is clear, voice prompts accurate. The only problem is that it wants to go online to search for an address or location and I often get a message says that the phone is unable to connect to the specific server, which means it won't find the location you want. You can take the phone offline and it uses basic pre-installed mapping but when I did that it messed up my email, and wouldn't connect to my email account until I restarted the phone. But overall OVI maps is very good.

Camera quality of above what I expected from a £120 phone, 3.2 mp with flash, it consistantly provides decent photos, even when viewed on a PC monitor. Video quality is also better than I hoped for when in 'high quality' mode, though quality drops badly when you change this setting which you have to do to send a short video as a multimedia message.

Call quality seems excellent, though the loudspeaker doesn't seem as good as other Nokias I've used.

The music player seems good too, was quite easy to set up and download music from my PC. A major bonus is the use of a 3.5mm headphone jack which means that any pair of headphones with a 'mini jack' can be used (you may need an adapter if you use larger hi-fi standard headphones, but these are easy to get hold of) so you are not restricted to the headphones the phone comes with. There is a good 'text to speech' application where the phone 'reads' out messages for you should you wish. Facebook, YouTube, RealPlayer and MySpace are all supported and setting up email was pretty easy and works well, although the phone is constantly asking to go online to check email which can be annoying.

Negatives are few really - the screen isn't that good, if you view it from just a few degrees from straight on you can't see the screen and it really attracts finger marks. If you miss a text or call there are no reminders - on some other Nokia's you get a small flashing light to tell you that you have a text and Samsungs will repeat your alert tone every few minutes. On the C5 you have to unlock the phone to wake the screen up and check for messages or calls. The ringtones are not especially loud so if you spend a lot of time outside its easy to miss calls, though the vibrate feature works well. Also although the phone supports multiple deletion of messages, the operating system is poor and long winded, which makes marking messages to be deleted quite time consuming. The screen will go blank after its pre determinded time (which you can adjust of course) but means that if you are playing a game or in the middle of a text message for example and thinking about something the screen keeps going dark, which doesn't happen with my other Nokia.

I nearly didn't buy this phone as the Nokia website said that the C5 doesn't have an alarm clock or loudspeaker, both of which I use regularly. I decided to get one anyway, only to find that it DOES have an alarm clock and loudspeaker! The only other ommission is the lack of timer or countdown timer. Another feature I miss from older Nokias is when sending text messages, you can't use a 'recently sent' list, you have to search your phone book, which is slightly fustrating if you send messges to just a small handful of people, plus there is no option to have a favourite which you used to be able to do with other Nokia's

Overall this is a very decent phone for not a lot of money, what sold it to me was that it is a smart phone with all the apps etc but I didn't want a touch screen, I want to use buttons! and because the screen isn't massive like an iPhone the battery lasts ages (unlike an iPhone). Granted the lack of screen size (2.2inches approx) makes web browing a little harder than an iPhone, it is fine for reading email or checking a site like BBC for news headlines etc. Pages from a site like the BBC load very very quickly too, as long as you have a decent signal. Overall I think the C5 is hard to beat for value for money, you get a lot of features and phone for your money with the C5. :-)

The Nokia C5 is the first mobile from the C-series, and it features an excellent set of features, for it's price of about 130 euros. It has Quad-band GSM, GPRS and EDGE support, and also has HSDPA and HSUPA 3G Support. It has a good body build, perfect size for carrying around in pockets and in the hand, and also has a 'metallic feel' to it. It has a good QVGA screen with moderate sunlight legibility.

It is also an extremely fast mobile with a 128MB RAM and 600MHz Processor. It has a 3 megapixel camera with fixed focus, which takes good quality pictures, but the quality is drastically reduced in low light conditions. It video recorder isn't the best, but at the price, it's as good as it gets. It has a 3.5 mm audio jack and supports most common music files (MP3/WAV/eAAC+/WMA. The sound quality is just as good as an XpressMusic phone too.

It has a 16GB memory card slot, with 2GB included, and also features smart dialing. But the best feature I found was that is has full GPS tracking support and a free lifetime voice guided navigation system, which is hardly found on phones at this cost. It also has a good battery life.

Other than these, it has great internet browsing and supports all facebook, myspace and twitter applications.

The only faults it has are having no Wi-Fi, and the memory card is somewhat hard to take out, but other than these, this phone is a perfect value for it's cost.