Review: Nokia 5230 Nuron
Mar 30, 2010, 2:20 PM by Eric M. Zeman
Nokia's Nuron brings S60 5th Edition to T-Mobile. For S60 and T-Mo lovers, it may be worth picking up. It offers solid phone, camera and music experiences, but lags the competition when it comes to messaging and social networking.
Form
Is It Your Type?
The Nokia Nuron is an S60 5th Edition-based touchphone that's available from T-Mobile. There's been a significant lack of S60 phones from North American operators in recent months, so if S60 is your thing, the Nuron can fill the gap between now and when Symbian^3 devices begin to ship. It makes a few concessions when compared to its progenitor, the 5800 XpressMusic, in order to reach the sub-$100 price tag. Is it worth it?
Body
To my eyes, the Nuron is almost indistinguishable from the 5800 XpressMusic, which launched in October 2008. It is a monoblock phone that is fairly light and easy to grip. The top surface is larger than the back surface, meaning the sides of the Nuron taper slightly. On most phones, this makes it rest easier in the hand. The one problem with the Nuron's form is that it's a bit chubby. It is by no means a monster handset, but it's far from thin. It'll fit into your pocket with no problems, but you're going to know it's there.
The touch screen on the Nuron is flush with the plastic above and below it, but there is a ridge all around the edge of the top surface of the phone that sticks up. This protects the screen a bit, but does take away from the look.
Touring the rest of the front, you'll find a touch-sensitive Media shortcut button above the display, plus physical Send, End, and Menu buttons below the display. These three buttons are thin, but protrude from the surface so that they are easy to find and use. Travel and feedback was a bit mushy.
On the left side there is a memory card slot covered by a hatch. The hatch require some seriously sharp fingernails to dig open. I had to resort to using a pen cap to get it open.
The volume toggle is on the right side of the Nuron. It is set just above the side surface, making it easy to find without being obtrusive. Travel and feedback was just right. The spring-loaded sliding lock switch is below the volume toggle. It has a ridged surface, which makes it easy to find and even easier to grip for action. It feels solid, and springs right back up when let go.
The top surface houses the power button, microUSB port, 3.5mm headset jack and charging port. It's too bad that Nokia relied on an older chassis with the Nuron and doesn't allow the phone to charge via the microUSB port. Instead, it relies on the older mini pin-style charger. Just like the SIM and microSD card hatches, the hatch covering the microUSB port is a pain in the fingernail to open.
The back cover peels off easily enough if you need to pull the battery or get at the SIM card.
In all, by using an older design, Nokia has assured that the Nuron looks a bit dated. Thinner is in-er.
The Three S's
Screen
The Nuron's display measures 3.2 inches across the diagonal and packs in 360 x 640 pixels.That's many more pixels than some of the competition, and it makes a difference. The iPhone, HTC myTouch and Hero, for example, all use 320 x 480 screens. The extra pixels make the screen on the Nuron look just a bit sharper and clearer. Icons and text are just a fraction smoother, and that gives the display a much-needed kick. As for brightness, well, it works fantastically indoors. Outside? Not so much. Even cloudy days challenged the display's visibility. I can't say I love the aspect ratio. It's a narrow, tall display. I wish it were a bit wider.
Sound
If there's one thing Nokia can be relied on to (nearly) always get right, it is the telephone part of a cell phone. Clarity of phone calls was outstanding. I heard nary a second of static or noise when using the Nuron. Test calls were of the highest quality, and those on the other end said things sounded good, too. I do, however, wish the earpiece could have been louder. it was fine for making calls at home, but even with the volume set to max, it was difficult to use out in the real world. Ring tones are sufficiently loud, and I didn't miss any calls due to lack of hearing the Nuron. The speakerphone worked quite well, and was perfect for a quiet office setting. The vibrate alert was strong enough that it won't be missed if stuffed in your pocket.
Sound via Bluetooth was also very good. Using a Motorola Pure H15 headset, calls were crystal clear, and free of muddiness that sometimes comes with Bluetooth calls.
Signal
The Nuron also excelled at finding and holding T-Mobile's network. Sitting on my home office, it captured full 3G strength (with Nokias that's seven bars). Traveling around the Northern New Jersey area and Las Vegas showed the Nuron doing a good job of finding signal. It reverted to EDGE in much of Las Vegas, but so did other phones I had with me. I did not miss any calls, nor did I drop any calls during my time testing the Nuron.
Battery
Battery life with the Nuron was quite good. I was able to get through at least two full days of heavy use with no problems. That outperforms many of today's highly connected devices. Using Bluetooth didn't seem to put a dent in battery life. There's no Wi-Fi on the Nuron, so no need to worry about managing that radio.
Touch
The Nuron uses a resistive touch screen, and suffers for it. Nokia has yet to go all out and build a great capacitive display for its handsets. The Nuron works, but anyone used to a capacitive screen will have trouble adjusting, especially because S60 5th Edition requires double presses to activate some features and menus. The overall experience is frustrating. Nokia's competitors have been switching to capacitive displays on their mid-tier devices. I wish Nokia would hurry up already and do the same.
Basics
Menus
The last S60 5th Edition phone we reviewed was the N97. The Nuron has been slightly T-Mobile-ized, and makes changes to some of the basic features of S60 5th Edition. T-Mobile decided to ax the basic S60 5th Edition home screen, which is normally filled with widgets that let users access all sorts of different content from the home screen. Instead, the default theme is the standard S60 3rd Edition layout, with the shortcut list at the top of the screen, and four permanent software buttons along the bottom of the screen.
If you want to access the main menu, press the physical menu button on the front face of the phone. Press and hold the menu key to see a list of apps that are running. The main menu can be laid out in grid or list fashion, and users can rearrange the location of all the icons in the menu. One thing I really like is that S60 5th Edition feels flatter than S60 3rd Edition. In other words, you don't have to dig and dig through multiple folders to find things.
The one baffling thing that Nokia has done is to necessitate double-tapping in many of the menus. Because it isn't deployed uniformly across the entire OS, it takes a bit of time to learn which menus and actions need to be double-tapped rather than tapped once. My word to describe this would be: annoying.
The Nuron is noticeably faster in basic performance than the N97 was. Menus open swiftly, screen transitions are snappy, and I didn't notice any lag. This made the overall experience much better. The phone also asks permission *slightly* less than it used to. S60 was notorious for constantly asking the user to confirm selections. I noticed less of this with the Nuron, and that's a good thing.
By flattening the menu structure and making things easier to find, most users should have no problem adjusting to S60 5th Edition, especially those who are familiar with S60.
Calls/Contacts
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.
Messaging
I am sad to report that Nokia has yet to make any serious strides in improving messaging features on S60. The SMS application, for example, is nearly the same has it has been for five or more years. Seriously, Nokia, speed up development on some new software here. What you're offering stinks. The message composition screen has a very dated look. Inserting or attaching media is archaic, and the whole experience needs more polish.
Users can choose to input text with either a software T9 set up (portrait) or a software QWERTY (landscape). Both work pretty well. The software QWERTY is a little crunched up, but has most of the punctuation buttons available without having to hit an ALT or Shift key.
It is definitely worth mentioning that S60 still doesn't offer a decent, native threaded messaging feature. The SMS/MMS inbox can be sorted by "Date", "Sender", "Subject", and so on. Sorting by Sender, however, doesn't mean you get threaded text conversations. Instead, it means you get all the messages from one contact listed together. You can read them all, but you still have to move from message to message, they aren't all in the same window. This needs to change immediately, Nokia. Everyone else is doing it better than you.
One thing Nokia doesn't do with Ovi (which in my opinion, it should) is to have all Nokia phone users create an Ovi profile and account. Joe Public can buy the Nuron and ignore Ovi completely and have a decent experience. That's a mistake. Look at what Apple, Google, Palm and even Microsoft are all doing these days. Users are encouraged — if not forced — to create master accounts that oversee their experience with the platform. Nokia would do well to mandate or otherwise encourage users to create an Ovi profile. This would help spur Ovi adoption and breed investment in the Ovi and Nokia brands. Another lost opportunity for Nokia, as far as I am concerned.
Moving on...
The email wizard will walk you through email set-up, which supports POP3, IMAP and Exchange. You can create and store multiple accounts on the device. The email software itself sees very little change compared to what's on S60 3rd Ed. In fact, it is disappointingly similar. No nice new graphics, no nice new user interface. It offers the same old look and feel that the email app has always offered. It doesn't come anywhere near the competition.
Via the T-Mobile web2go portal, there's a link to the Facebook Mobile site, but there are no social networking applications on board the device out of the box. You have to go searching for them online. Where's Gravity for Twitter?
As far as IM goes, the on-board client supports AIM, Windows, Yahoo, Google Talk and MySpaceIM. (What, no Facebook IM?)
The Nuron certainly covers the messaging basics, but it doesn't tackle any new ground, something that Nokia sorely needs to do.
Extras
Music
The Nuron supports microSD cards up to 16GB. You're not going to have any problems stuffing the Nuron with music, video and photo content, that's for sure. Music can be synced directly to the Nuron's storage or via Nokia's PC Suite software. It can also be side-loaded into a microSD card.
The basic music player is, once again, the same that Nokia uses on its other S60 handsets. That are no new features that I can find. For such a media-centric device, I was holding out hope that Nokia would pay some extra attention to the music app. It didn't.
Playback works fine and all the controls make sense. It is easy to use and adjust, set play lists and save songs as ringtones, but I was expecting more pizazz. The Nuron has an FM radio, but no transmitter.
Given the overall same-ness, it's obvious that Nokia is investing its time and money elsewhere.
Camera
Camera
The Nuron has a 2 megapixel shooter on the back. No autofocus, no flash. The camera has been somewhat optimized for use with the touchscreen, and that's a welcome change. The camera uses about 80% of the screen as the viewfinder, and the right side of the screen is used for some of the controls. Choose from the three software buttons to get at the various controls. You can also make tons of other adjustments, such as to the brightness, exposure, ISO, sharpness, contrast, and so on. The selections are presented on the screen in a grid, and they are perfectly sized for your finger, None of these are new features for a Nokia, though.
I do like that the camera launches very quickly. It is about the fastest launching camera I've seen from Nokia. It also takes pictures is short order, with little to no delay between pushing the shutter button and the camera capturing the image.
The video software works nearly identically to the still camera software.
Gallery
As far as I can tell, the only way to view pictures on the Nuron is via a boring old grid configuration. Gone is the pretty picture carousel used on some of the older N Series devices. You can scroll through the images, and then select one to interact with and/or adjust it. Once you've loaded one image on the screen, swipe in either direction to see your other photos. The options let you do pretty much anything with the pictures you've captured, though the Nuron nearly always assumes you want to share the images on Ovi.
Editing features are pretty robust. You can make tons of adjustments to pictures after the fact, including: alter the brightness, contrast and sharpness; crop, decrease size, or rotate; insert frames, text bubble, and clip art; and change the color effects of the image, too. Not bad at all.
Pictures/Video
Pictures
The Nuron has a 2 megapixel shooter, so I wasn't expecting much from it. In truth, it does pretty well. Images were sharp, colors were true-to-life, and white balance was very good. Pictures taken outdoor looked exceptionally good for a 2 megapixel camera. Indoor shots didn't fare too badly. They exhibited more grain, and colors were less vibrant, but in all it did pretty well. Being limited to 2 megapixels, you're not going to capture 16 x 20-worthy images, but they'll look good enough on Facebook, MySpace or TwitPic.
Video
Video looks pretty good, too. It captures video at VGA resolutions and can be optimized for various different sharing situations. If you're going to load it onto a computer, simply select the highest setting (which is the default). You can also trim videos down to email- and MMS-sized resolutions. Scorsese wouldn't be able to craft a masterpiece with the Nuron, but that's not going to stop some ambitious users from trying to produce the next Goodfellas movie from their phones.
NuronVideoSample
MPEG-4 format (viewable with QuickTime)
Browse/Customize
Browser
The Nuron comes with the venerable S60 browser, which is based on Webkit (like iPhone and Android). The browser comes with all the same features that we've see on other S60 handsets, including the mini-map. It my opinion the browser uses way too many drop-down menus to get to a lot of the features. Perhaps the most useful change is that one of the software controls will open up a big finger-friendly grid for navigating to your bookmarks and so on. I wish all of the menus of the browser were this easy to use.
The home page is T-Mobile's web2go platform, which offers all the links users need to access basic information such as news and weather. If you want to browse the open web, you have to use the phone's options to get at the URL address bar and so on.
Browsing via T-Mobile's 3G network was nice and speedy. Mobile-optimized sites loaded in just a couple of seconds. Full HTML took a little bit longer to download, but they were still comparatively quick. Having the large screen makes for a better experience.
Customize
Most S60 phones let you customize a fair amount of the phone's features and functions. Wallpapers, ringtones, alerts, and so on are all easy-breezy. The home page can be set to have as much or little content as you want. The main menu can be re-arranged however you like it. Nearly every notification, service, and application can at least be tweaked, if not significantly altered to appeal to users' preferences. You don't like something? Chances are, you can fix that.
Extras
Bluetooth
The Bluetooth features of the Nuron worked exceptionally well. I had no problems pairing with pretty much every device in my office. Sound quality of phone calls through mono headsets was great, and music quality through stereo headsets was also very good. Out of the box, the Bluetooth menu is buried pretty deep. It's actually kind of a pain. If you use Bluetooth often, I'd recommend setting it as one of the home screen shortcuts.
Clock
The N97 is a frustrating watch replacement. There doesn't appear to be a way to get the time to show up nice and large when you want to. When the phone is locked, pressing any of the keys just generates the "you need to unlock the phone first" message. You can't see the time on this page. You have to go all the way and unlock the phone to read the clock on the home page. Lame. Once unlocked, the age-old analog clock is where it always is, in the upper-left corner of the home screen. That can be switched to digital if you wish.
GPS
The Nuron is the first Nokia device to be offered with free Ovi Maps. (Why TeleNav's software is also on board is a question I can't answer.) The newest version of Ovi Maps is robust and works quite well. It offers free point-to-point, voice-guided walking and driving directions. The GPS was the fastest I've experienced on a Nokia device. The Nuron was able to peg my location within a few meters in less than 20 seconds. Older Nokia phones would take a minute or more to lock onto GPS.
I was able to generate directions with no issues, and the phone was able to figure out if/when I got lost, and would re-route me if I did. The mapping software works fast, too. With many phone-based map systems, a network connection is required to obtain the mapping information. Ovi Maps caches map data so it can be accessed faster (and in areas where there's no signal or a weak signal). Ovi Maps easily beat Google Maps in simple walking directions around Las Vegas, if only because it was able to provide information in areas with questionable coverage.
Ovi Store
The Nuron comes pre-loaded with the Ovi Store. The Ovi Store is where users can choose to browse, buy and download applications. I haven't tested it in a while, and it is noticeably easier to use than when I last checked it out several months ago. Searching is easier, the categories make more sense, and it downloads apps fairly fast. It's also less crash-y. I'd say Apple and Google still have the apps edge — at least as far as their own storefronts are concerned, but the Ovi Store is usable, no doubt.
There's also a separate web2go apps store that is run and managed by T-Mobile. The web2go store is a little bit easier to navigate, especially for those used to using T-Mobile branded services.
Wrap-up
The Nuron is one of less than a dozen S60 handsets officially available from network operators in the U.S. It is definitely a lower-end device, and doesn't offer all that the 5800 XpressMusic or N97 do. Still, for a sub-$100 handset, it's not bad.
The biggest negative, in my opinion, is that the Nuron (and S60 5th Edition) continue to lag the competition significantly when it comes to messaging features. It simply doesn't compare. Every other smartphone platform is better. If messaging and social networking are priority numero uno, look elsewhere.
The Nuron's 2 megapixel shooter performs admirably, though it lacks autofocus and flash. The music application is robust, but hasn't been changed in ages. The display looks good, but is narrow and the body of the Nuron is a bit thick for my tastes.
S60 still offers plenty of oomph, but it is aging rapidly. Nokia has said that the first Symbian^3 devices will hit the market at the end of 2010. Handsets running Symbian^3 will offer major changes to the underlying architecture and user interface. I'd seriously consider Nokia fanatics to bide their time and wait for Symbian^3's arrival.
However, if you want a touch phone on the T-Mobile network and aren't interested in Android, WinMo or Samsung's TouchWiz, the Nuron is going to be your best choice. It offers many of the features of a smartphone for a nice low price point.
About the author, Eric M. Zeman:Eric has been covering the mobile telecommunications industry for 17 years at various print and online publications. He studied at Rutgers Newark and University of Kentucky, and has a degree in writing. He likes playing guitar, attending concerts, listening to music, and driving sports cars.
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