Review: Nokia 5230 Nuron
Calls
Making calls with the Nuron is as easy as any other phone. The home screen has a tiny little picture of a dialpad at the bottom. Press that and the numeric keypad shows up. The software keys are nice and large and easy to dial.
With the dialpad open, you can punch in the numbers directly, open the contacts app, or bring up a list of your recent calls. Touching the green send key from the home screen will automatically bring up the call log. You can set the call log to store calls for 0, 1, 10, or 30 days (default).
I was unable to get the dialpad to show up with the Nuron held sideways. It would only show the call log when held horizontal. If you start a call while holding the phone sideways, it will rotate the display to the horizontal/portrait orientation. In other words, the Nuron doesn't like to make phone calls when horizontal.
Contacts
One curious omission is a feature that lets users store up to four contacts directly onto the home screen. This S60 5th Edition tool gives you instant access to those contacts and their information, but it's not there. My guess is that T-Mobile feels MyFaves (which isn't really marketed any more) is a better solution. I would have preferred if Nokia and/or T-Mobile left that feature intact.
The main contact app lets you store reams of data about people. Contacts can be synced via Nokia's desktop client or through T-Mobile's contacts storage service if you care to use it. Syncing to T-Mobile's cloud-based service means you can always re-load your contacts if your phone is lost or you change to another phone.
Each contact page has buttons that let you instantly do things such as send a message, call them or email them. Searching through the contacts app is easy with the search bar. Simply start typing and it automatically starts to search.