Nokia C5-06

Overview

Nokia C5-06: Affordable and Feature-rich

The Nokia C5-06 is a low- to mid-range mobile offering from the iconic phone manufacturer, designed to offer a wide range of features at an affordable price. How successful is it?

Design and Build Quality of Nokia C5-06

The phone weighs a mere 93 grams. It measures 106 by 51 and is 14mm thick. The 3.2-inch screen offers a 16 million-color display with a resolution of 320x640 pixels. The screen’s resistive touchscreen hardware provides a good layer of protection against scratches and accidental damage, but reduces the screen’s sensitivity so significantly that it needs multiple presses to perform tasks. The device comes in a range of colors, including red, orange, turquoise, silver, steel and white, and the design is tough and durable, although not particularly distinctive.

User Interface and Comfort to Use

A Symbian phone, the C5-06 runs Symbian’s S60 5th edition, powered by its 600MHz ARM11 processor, a very underwhelming piece of hardware. Compared to the power of competitor phones, the phone feels quite sluggish and unresponsive, and it struggles with more heavy-duty tasks and apps. The interface itself is simple and traditional, with icons arranged in a grid format on a single home screen.

Telephony and Phonebook

The phone’s contacts function offers a suite of basic features, but little besides. It supports unlimited entries, and contacts can be grouped for easier browsing. It also permits multiple numbers per contact, and photos for identification, although the lack of social media integration is disappointing. Contacts can be searched by first or last name. The absence of a secondary camera means that the phone doesn’t support video calling. Call quality is average: the phone is generally too quiet, and really suffers in noisy environments, where callers will struggle to make themselves heard. The phone does store detailed call records for the previous 30 days, which is a useful feature.

Messaging and Emails of Nokia C5-06

The phone supports all basic messaging formats: SMS, MMS, IM and email. Instant messaging is supported with Nokia’s Messaging app. Users are encouraged to use the native Ovi Mail app in conjunction with a free email account from Nokia. The email service automatically transfers existing messages to the phone, for reading and responding. The on-screen QWERTY keyboard is quite narrow in portrait, and the small keys difficult to use, particularly in the absence of any special features to aid with text entry, such as gestures, although the predictive text is smart and useful.

Gallery, Photo Viewer and Video Player

The phone’s internal memory is a very limited 40MB, insufficient for storing anything but a limited number of emails and texts. However, the micro-SD slot allows the users to insert a card with an additional 16GB, which should be more than enough for media storage. The phone’s Gallery app displays photos and images in a grid display, and provides users with a few tools for editing them. The phone includes the SmartMovie video player, a humble app with the most basic playback functions. You won’t be playing HD video, but there is good support for basic codecs like MP-4 and WMV.

Music Player and FM Radio

The phone’s music player function includes basic playback, limited to play/pause, shuffle and browsing, although it supports several major file formats. The C5-06 includes a stereo FM radio with a standard auto-tune function that helps to pick up and strengthen signals from local stations. Sound quality is poor, as you might expect from a phone of this segment; the phone’s loudspeaker is particularly tiny and unpleasant.

Nokia c5-06 Still Camera and Image Quality

The Nokia C5-06 includes a 2-megapixel rear camera with 3x digital zoom. Additional features are limited, although the phone does allow geo-tagging of images. Lacking a flash, the camera performs very poorly in low-light settings, and the absence of auto-focus means that it produces photos with little depth of field.

Video Camera and Video Quality

The phone permits only the most basic video capture using its low-resolution camera. The result is quite poor, grainy resolution and dull colors, and the camera copes badly with changes in light levels, particularly low light.

Connectivity Options of Nokia C5-06

Limited connectivity options come as part of the phone’s hardware: Bluetooth version 2.1, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, GPRS and EDGE. The phone also features a micro-USB port, which enables the device to be connected to a PC.

Organiser and other utility tools

The phone comes with a suite of basic tools already installed, including a handy Organizer with features for linking calendars and tasks, and creating reminders. It has a QuickOffice document viewer, but editing documents from the phone requires a paid upgrade.

Web Browser and Applications

Slow data transfers make the web browsing experience on this Nokia phone quite painful. The web browser features only very limited Flash support, running the Adobe Flash Lite software. There are a few additional features, such as support for RSS feeds and bookmarking. The phone is also Java-compatible, which means that users can download games to play on the phone. For additional apps, users have access to the Nokia Ovi Store, which has a respectable range of apps.

Google Maps and GPS in Nokia C5-06

The phone has in-built A-GPS connectivity, and users are encouraged to use Nokia’s native Ovi Maps app, which has much to recommend it as a competitor to the ubiquitous Google Maps. Particularly attractive is the free lifetime sat-nav. The app is an effective way-finding tool: the directions given are clear, and demonstrated routes are rendered well on detailed maps bolstered by landmarks and local POIs. There are a number of useful third-party apps, such as TripAdvisor, that add deep detail to the maps.

Value for money

The phone offers a respectable range of features for its modest price tag, and it is a good choice for those who want some of the functionality of a smartphone, without paying the significant cost of a top-of-the-range handset.

Verdict of Nokia C5-06

The Nokia C5-06 is a modest handset: not particularly powerful, it struggles with anything beyond basic tasks. If that’s all you need, it’s an attractive buy, but don’t expect an outstanding media experience.