Some phones are meant to give you pain every time you use them despite of the fact how many features are there in side. Nokia is focusing a lot on the middle and upper tier of mobile phones, but, perhaps, it has started to ignore the lower end market which is giving it most of the revenue and helping it maintain the market leader role.
Nokia 5030 has no doubt very good Radio and Speaker but you can’t use it as radio only. It has to be able to give you similar pleasure while making a call or pushing a button on D-Pad. Good things first, it is Nokia’s first phone with internal FM antenna. That means, you don’t need headset or external antenna to listen to your favorite radio station.
Good
- FM with Built-in antenna
- Speaker Phone
- Flash Light
- Spread sheet for daily and monthly accounts
Bad
- Irritating hard keypad
- FM does not catch all the city stations
- No memory card
- No USB
- No Bluetooth
Radio is activated with a dedicated one-touch radio key that is placed on the left side of the phone along with frequency changer keys on upper and lower side. Inside the building, antenna will not catch all the radio stations, even outside; it will not be able to catch all the stations.
Weighing only 82 grams it is easy to carry and equally easy to see your texts on the TFT display which is 1.8″. Phone book save up to 500 contacts and 20 dialed, received, and missed calls remain in the memory.
It has all the options a lower end phone can have with couple of extra features including Converter, Spreadsheet and Demo. Spreadsheet is useful option if you want to maintain your daily expense and have it recorded and organized on monthly and daily basis, this utility will help you record almost all the normal expenses day to day expenses.
Call quality is good and integrated loudspeaker enables nice and clear sound. Particularly, in Pakistan torch has become a need of the hour. A handy torch that can be accessed from the menu is powerful enough to fulfill most of the requirements.
Voice clock is another addition that serves best as an Alarm or if you want to know the current time without seeing your screen, just press the “star” button and voice clock will tell the current time.
Very Annoying Key Pad
All the good things on one side, every time you bring out your phone, you need to press a button to make a call or enter into a menu item. Very frequently you will end up pushing some other button and that will not be your desired button.
Nokia has tried to give a unique look and replaced the regular buttons with a plain numeric keypad which is extra ordinarily annoying both in case of dialing a number or typing a text message. Most of the time you will try to push the “Right Menu” button and your phone will turn off automatically because you had accidentally pushed the end key.
The key pad is so flat that there is no boundary or edges to differentiate buttons. There are major chances to dial wrong numbers and send your SMS to unwanted people most of the time. The hard stony buttons will not help you for a long time.
ZTE A316G introduced by Zong has softer buttons than Nokia 5030 XpressRadio
We found this facility more appropriate in one of the ZTE’s phones which is far cheaper than 5030. The ZTE A316G comes with the Zong bundle offer and is available for Rs. 1,400 which is very convenient to type and dial with due to its very prominent and clean dial pad.
I don’t say the phone is filled with features but it’s D-Pad and looks are better than Nokia 5030.
[...] http://www.apnatime.com/4413/2010/01/26/gadgets/mobilephones/nokia-5030-phone-stone/ [...]