Nokia 5235 Comes with Music Review

In the grand scheme of things, the Nokia Comes With Music service can hardly be called a success. It’s a year or so since the service launched, and with little more than 100,000 subscribers worldwide, it has to be seen as a disappointment. At first glance, it would seem that the CWM service is something that any music lover would go for, with unlimited music downloads for 12 months, and at the end of that period, whilst you cannot download anymore tracks, anything you have already grabbed is yours to keep, forever. But the issue with the service is in the detail, and that is the music you download can only be played on the PC you have registered with the service, and on the handset itself. Despite the claim Nokia often roll out, that they sell more music players than any other company in the world, the truth of the matter is most people like to be able to choose their own music player, and any kind of restriction is automatically seen as a negative. Nokia may sell more music devices by number, but they are certainly not number one in terms of music devices used.

Despite the poor interest so far in CWM, Nokia still see a future for the service, and to that end they have announced the Nokia 5235 Comes With Music phone, which is scheduled for launch in Q1 2010.

The 5235 is a fully featured device, sporting a large touchscreen, running on S60 v5, the same operating software as found in the Nokia 5800. The display on the 5235 is a capacitive TFT screen, measuring 3.2 inches, supporting up to 16 million colours and with a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels. By using a capacitive display, the 5235 will work by touch or with a stylus, and data can be entered on screen by using the traditional style alphanumeric keypad, full screen or mini QWERTY or using handwriting recognition. The familiar looking 5235 isn’t going to win any style contests; the whole shape is very familiar to anyone who has taken notice of recent Nokia devices. Candybar design, the device measures in at 111 x 52 x 16mm and weighs 115g.

The music player will be a main focus of the handset, and it copes well, with support for a whole host of digital formats, all of the major ones are included, whilst the interface of the music player is going to be very familiar to anyone who has used a Nokia device recently. Once music has been loaded onto the device, it can be accessed via composer, genre, album or artist. Setting up a playlist is a simple enough process and the general quality of music played on the phone is pretty good. As with all other Comes With Music devices, the Nokia 5235 includes a 3.5mm audio jack, so you can use your own headset with the phone, plus there is support for Bluetooth 2.0 which includes A2DP stereo Bluetooth connectivity. The video player on the handset is nothing special, disappointingly Nokia still cannot seem to include native support for DivX and XviD, to watch these you will need to download a third party app.

Nokia do a good job usually of packing their devices with a whole host of technology, and all round the 5235 is solid, if a little uninspiring. The main weak areas are the lack of WiFi, and a weak imaging option. The 5235 offers just a basic point n shoot 2.0 Megapixel camera, which is adequate at best, but video capture is reasonable enough with the device able to record at QVGA resolution, at 30 fps.

There is plenty of storage space available for all your music tracks on the 5235, thanks to support for memory expansion with MicroSD memory cards, up to 16GB is possible. Although there is no WiFi, the 5235 does offer high speed data transfer via HSDPA, up to 3.6Mbps which should see an average length MP3 file download within a minute or so. If 3G is not available in your area, the 5235 offers EDGE or GPRS as an alternative.

One area where Nokia have done well with a lot of their phones is the inclusion of GPS, and the excellent Nokia Maps. Thankfully both GPS and Nokia Maps are included on the 5235, with Nokia Maps 2.0 optimised for touch included. Nokia Maps generally is free to use, the only time you would need to pay is if you wanted a license for voice navigation, which can be purchased on the device through the options menu. The best way to use Nokia Maps is to download the maps for the areas you want in advance from the Nokia Maps website, avoiding any need to stream Maps whilst using the service.

In summing up, it is hard not to use the word boring to describe the Nokia 5235, I mean, we’ve seen it all before really. This is just another rehash of a well used design, with the same old features found on so many other Nokia devices. I don’t want to be too unkind, but there is little in terms of innovation on this phone, and it is hard to see where the sales interest will come from. The 5235 is not a bad phone, far from it, but the question is, is it good enough to stand out against its rivals?

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