Symbian for £100: Nokia 5230 gets even cheaper

Nokia’s 5230 smartphone was always a real bargain, launching last summer for €149 (£130) without subsidy, but still boasting direct access to all the key Ovi services plus the full Symbian Series 60 operating system (not the low end Nokia software platform, S40). Now the phone has got even cheaper, coming down to €110 or £100 on several pay-as-you-go deals, making it the lowest cost Symbian handset ever seen.

This was part of an across-the-board price cutting move by Nokia last week, which saw many devices fall by as much as 10% in wholesale terms, as the company goes for Samsung’s jugular in the mass market and makes way for the new models it will show off at Mobile World Congress this month. One of these will be the more affordable 16Gb version of the X6 mediaphone, which will ship on February 24 and will, according to Nokia insiders, boast the firm’s largest ever advertising budget for a single model.

The 5230 is is now hugely competitive in the expected boom area for early 2010 – the affordable open OS handset, rising in importance as first-time smartphone users and the youth market shift away from featurephones.

The 5230 is typical of the breed of phones targeting this space. It has the same 3.2-inch touchscreen as the popular 5800 music smartphone, and many of the same features, but skimps on a few areas, such as memory, to keep the cost down. It incorporates GPS and Ovi Maps, including turn-by-turn navigation and 3D landmarks, and Symbian S60 5th Edition. Its navigation features are even more of a bargain now Nokia has made all its mapping and directions services free.

Finally, Nokia continues to step up the pressure on Apple, not just in the law courts and the carrier catalogs, but in the blogs too. After Apple CEO Steve Jobs claimed last week that his firm was the largest mobile device maker in the world, Nokia’s head of social media, Mark Squires, posted an article called ‘A Fruit Confused?’ on Nokia Conversations. He said Jobs had ignored the generally accepted and “stable” definition of mobile devices by including laptops, and that Nokia had beaten Apple on the revenue front in Q409, posting €8.18bn as opposed to Apple’s €7.25bn.