Nokia 5230 mobile phone – out soon

The Nokia 5230 touchscreen mobile phone, due for a late 2009 release, is, as are many phones these days, quite the all-rounder. Phone, music player, digital camera, videocamera, GPS device… but if it has a real focus, other than being a phone of course, it is as a media player – with microSD card there’s an additional 16GB of possible storage on top of the 170MB internal memory, and there’s a media bar touch key for accessing music, gallery, share online, video centre and web browser.

The phone offers 33 hours of music playback, and in overseas markets, Nokia is hooking this phone up with its Comes With Music service – this won’t be so in Australia unfortunately.

The 5230 also looks like it’s delved into some ideas that HTC have shown off lately, in enabling you from the address book to easily see all your interaction with people in your address book – not only all the calls made to and received from them, but also emails, photos, Facebook and other social media services. HTC offers this right across your contacts list, while on the 5230 it looks like Nokia is allowing you to collect this detailed record of connectedness with your 20 closest friends or important contacts in the Contacts bar.

It has a ‘candy bar’ form factor, and you’ll have the choice of white or dark sliver – it also comes with an assortment of coloured battery covers. Other features include an accelerometer for auto-rotatation of the screen from portrait to landscape, 70MB of internal memory, microSD memory card slot with hot swap max. 16 GB, automatic answer option with headset or car kit, A-GPS and Ovi Maps 3.0 application, 2 megapixel camera and a 3.5 mm stereo headphone plug.

Price and availability

This Nokia 5230 is down for a release sometime in the 4th quarter of 2009. Pricing and carriers will be announced closer to the launch date.