Nokia Nuron for T-Mobile review
By Chris Ziegler 
posted March 22nd 2010 12:01AM
posted March 22nd 2010 12:01AM
Despite its flaws, the 5800 has gone on to become a global success for Nokia -- but can the Nuron do the same in a market traditionally unfazed by Nokia's advances? More directly, has Nokia's first volley in the modern touchphone battle evolved enough to become a prime-time player in the States? Let's find out.
As you might be able to gather from its family tree, the Nuron is a dead ringer for the 5230 and for the 5800 before it -- it's the same physical layout (and made from the same materials) all the way around, and the white / silver color scheme that T-Mobile has chosen for its version might be our favorite of the lot. Along the right side you've got a one-position camera button (there's no autofocus to worry about), a volume rocker, and the lock / unlock slider familiar to those who've used the 5800, N900, or a number of other Nokia products. On the left you'll find two slots protected by flaps -- one for the microSD card, another for the SIM; getting the SIM in is a simple matter, while getting it out again requires just a little more effort since you've got to remove the battery and use a pen or similarly-shaped object to pop it back out through a slot in the circuit board, but it shouldn't be a big deal unless you do a ton of SIM swapping. Along the top you've got a power button that calls up the typical profile menu when pressed, a 3.5mm headphone jack, a micro-USB port protected by a flap, and -- get this -- an old-school 2mm power jack. Why's it there, you ask? Because the Nuron doesn't charge over micro-USB, which is positively unheard of by 2010 standards, even in Nokia's own product pipeline. The only possible explanation is that the Nuron's based on 18 month-old hardware, but that doesn't make it acceptable.
On the left side, you'll also find a small hole toward the bottom. This is the lanyard port, an accessory that plays a slightly more important role on the Nuron than on most phones because -- like the 5800 -- it's provided with a plectrum in the box. As a refresher, "plectrum" is the uncool dictionary term for a guitar pick, and "uncool" is exactly how we'd describe Nokia's expectation that anyone would want to carry this thing on a string hanging off the corner of their phone. How necessary is the plectrum, exactly? Fortunately, we found that the resistive display pared with the latest incarnation of S60 5th Edition here does a relatively good job of keeping our fat fingers happy, and for those very rare occasions where we need more precision, we can just turn our finger around and use our fingernail temporarily. Disaster averted, no plectrum necessary -- but seriously, if Nokia really thought you'd need a tool like this, they would've been well-served to find a way to slip a stylus into the case (something better than the 5800's afterthought of a stylus built into the battery cover, that is). We're sure there's room.
We know there'd be room for a stylus because something very, very important was left out of the Nuron: WiFi. To leave out WiFi from a smartphone these days and charge $70 for it on contract is almost insulting, and it's particularly egregious when you're launching the device on the carrier with the smallest 3G footprint of the Big Four. Of course, we've got to let T-Mobile take part of the blame on this one -- they (and their customers) would've been well-served to ask Nokia for a branded version of the WiFi-equipped 5800 rather than the 5230, which in turn would've made us a wee bit more comfortable with the sticker price. As it stands, though, this is an extremely difficult device to recommend if you're outside of T-Mobile's 3G coverage area.
The phone offers up essentially the same tried-and-true WebKit-based champion of a browser that Nokia has been using on its smartphone for years, which does a fabulous job of rendering most sites designed for desktops; finger scrolling and automatic orientation changes both work well, too, but we found that the phone tended to choke up on more complex sites (Engadget is an unfortunate example). In general, the phone felt a little underpowered for some of the tasks it was being asked to perform; the "bounce" effect at the ends of lists during inertial scrolls was a little jerky, for example, and even simple tasks like pausing music were met with momentary delays -- nothing more than a fraction of a second, but perceptible nonetheless.
The big deal about the Nuron -- the 800-pound gorilla on the spec sheet, if you will -- is the fact that it includes Ovi Maps with turn-by-turn capability for free out of the box, making it one of the cheapest phones to ship anywhere with usable in-car navigation at no additional charge. We've already shown that Ovi shakes out as a pretty good solution when you put it up against the competition, and the Nuron is no exception -- but the phone shares the same weakness that we've seen on countless Nokias (and BlackBerrys) of the past: it's pretty hard to get a location lock. Anyone with an Android device or an iPhone of any generation knows that they can hop into their mapping app and get a rough location fix almost immediately, but even with AGPS fully enabled on the Nuron, we waited for several minutes by a window with downtown Washington, DC showing on the display (we're in Chicago) before giving up.
Wrap-up
In 1965, a man by the name of Ralph Nader published a book entitled Unsafe at Any Speed, an exposé of the American auto industry that detailed extreme safety shortcomings of cars manufactured at the time. What the heck does that have to do with the Nuron? Well, bear with us for a moment.The 5230 is a phone that sells internationally for €149 unsubsidized, unlocked, and unbranded. That's just $200! The Nuron, by contrast, is locked and branded, which immediately devalues the phone by a somewhat unquantifiable amount -- but regardless of the dollar figure you want to put on that, it's worth something less than $200. T-Mobile meanwhile charges you $70 to own this phone on top of a two-year contract with a $200 early-termination fee. Translated, that means that if you buy this phone, break your contract, and keep the phone, you're out $270.
Coincidentally, we kept thinking to ourselves "this might be a decent phone if it were free on contract" as we played with it. But it's not free, and it's certainly not worth a dime more than that. In other words, it's -- drum roll, please -- Unrecommendable at Any Price.
Here's another way of looking at it. In the context of T-Mobile's smartphone lineup, you've got the WinMo-based Dash 3G at $50, the G1 at $100, and the CLIQ XT at $130; realistically, we might expect to see the G1 fall in price one more time before it's discontinued. The Dash 3G's WinMo roots and lack of a touchscreen make it a tough call, but we wouldn't hesitate to recommend a G1 over the Nuron; like the G1, Nokia's latest entry certainly isn't going to win any beauty or thickness contests, and the G1 is arguably a significantly more capable device out of the box. Yes, free turn-by-turn is the Nuron's ace in the hole -- but when you've got this many negatives stacked up against you, it's just not enough, especially when you consider that Google Maps Navigation is on Android 1.6 anyhow.
If there's a positive we can take from this, it's that Nokia and T-Mobile are starting to work a lot more closely together than they have in the past; the Nuron is evidence of that, of course, and the N900's AWS support is a telling sign, too. With MeeGo in the pipe and Symbian chugging along, we're excited to see what these guys do together in the future, but for now, the Nuron -- which hits stores this Wednesday -- is unfortunately a strong avoid.
@(Unverified)
Yeah, but you can't set Opera as the default browser, which sucks.
Another thing this review didn't get into: Nokia Messaging. It's awful and buggy. Implementation of email in S60v5 leaves much to be desired.
@Johnny Tremaine
It just got out of beta last week and i have heard that some people were able to set the final version as the default browser.
I haven't tried though because i went back to the Beta 2 version after the final version turned out to have some annoying bug when used with my Samsung i8910's 3D navigation. A fast swipe to the right on a website makes my phone switch from Opera to the home screen instead of just scrolling around the site. Oddly this wasn't a problem in any Beta version and they haven't got any noticeable bugs so i just use Beta 2 :). I imagine it's a bit hard for them to test an application to work on so many different devices from different manufacturers.
I'm not a Nokia basher and I agree with this review. Anyone who buys the Nuron isn't a smart shopper.
For just about $50 more, around $249, you can buy the full 5800 Navigation Edition over at Amazon, Newegg or Dell.com. You can find the U.S. version of the original 5800 for probably lower than that.
Given that, why would you buy this gimped, Simple Jack version of the 5800 instead?
I don't know why engadget continues to make the mistake of thinking there is only 1 category of smartphones. Even your readers know enough to understand that there are different niches and segments within the smartphone market. Not every device has to be top of the line or perform and function at top of the line.
Wow, they sell this for roughly $200 unlocked overseas? That's pretty damn cheap. But for my $50-$100 on contract, about every carrier has them beat. On the Blackberry side Sprint and Verizon have the Tour 2 and Verizon has the the Storm 2. On the Android side Verizon has the Droid Eris, Sprint has the Moment, and T-Mobile has the G1. And to top it all off you still have the 8GB iPhone 3G on AT&T.
All of which are only $30 more then this. Across the four major carries voice and data plans have near identical pricing, though Sprint's data comes with free messaging and messaging on T-Mobile is $10 cheaper then Verizon/AT&T. The $150 cheaper ETF then Verizon is nice, but that's not saying much if you stay on contract the whole time. So honestly, there's not much encouraging price wise that's begging you to buy this. Seriously, save another $130, and buy a much better phone with a dead OS: the HTC HD2. You really want S60 5th that badly?
Seriously Chris, you were expecting the ringer volume to decrease with every press of the down volume key?? You've used countless Nokia's in the past, and you know the whole point of having Profiles is so you can set different ringer profiles so there's no need to change ringer volume via the volume rocker.
I get what you're saying about the price of the phone but just like every other phone out on the market, of course this thing is going to start off higher than what it's true value is. It's called the early adopter pricing model. Wait 2 months and this will be free just like every other entry level device from a carrier out there.
I really think you missed the big picture here. It's not that Nokia is working with T-Mobile more closely, even though that's apparent here. It's that Nokia has introduced one of their own on a U.S. carrier and it wasn't crippled with carrier firmware, and stripped of all the accessories you would otherwise get in the box. Nokia got T-Mobile to keep Ovi Maps with navigation on the device, and you can bet your ass this was because T-Mobile doesn't have their own Navigation software like AT&T and VZW. Yes, I know VZW let the Droid slip through the cracks, and both of them would have said hell no to Nokia keeping Ovi Maps on the Nuron if it was going to their network. Nokia was able to convince T-Mobile to keep it though, and I think this is a great first step for Nokia to start building a name for itself again in this market. AT&T isn't going to do that for Nokia, but T-Mobile looks like they will just by looking at this phone.
Now I'm just waiting for AT&T to come around and stop being gay with their Nokia's.
an extremely important fact that you are forgetting in your review, is the fact that phones such as cliq xt, require you to pay $30 dollars a month for a data plan. this phone only requires t-mobile's $10 web plan if you want to use the internet. this makes a big difference for people on a budget.
The 5230 is 53 € now in Germany, with contract, but the contract has no monthly fee or minimum turnover, so it's really 53 €. Good price I suppose.
Engadget,
I take issue with this review for a few reasons. Your biggest complaint is based around the price. This is a touch-screen smartphone that comes with a 4gb memory card, a 2mp camera, flash in the browser, multi-tasking, FREE TURN-BY-TURN NAVIGATION, etc. It is $180 straight up, no contracts, no nothing. $70 on contract.
My $400 Motorola Cliq and $450 Blackberry 9700 don't have some of those features (no flash in browser on either, no free turn-by-turn on either). Both phones cost MORE than the Nuron even with a full two-year contract discount price. How is this phone not recommended at any price? It is half the cost at least. Not to mention that all the other smartphones you compared it to REQUIRE a $30 monthly unlimited data plan. This phone DOES NOT REQUIRE a data plan, and the unlimited data plan for this phone is ONE-THIRD THE PRICE at $10.
To you, that may not mean much. But to millions of Americans, the $30 difference between a Nuron and a G1 (on top the total cost of ownership due to data plans) is a big difference.
Hate the software and the hardware all you want, but don't dare claim that this is not a value.
This review made me lose a lot of respect for your blog. Lets look at price here.
Off Contract Price: $180 -> $10 per mo for 18 months
Even More Plus (500): -> $30 per mo
Unlimited Texts -> $10 per mo
Unlimited 3G Data -> $10 per mo
Total Cost: $60 per mo with no startup cost or contract
Now, I'll compare to a similar priced phone on ATT, the "Samsung Solstice" with a 3 inch touchscreen
Phone Cost on Contract -> $50
Monthly Plan (450) -> $40 per mo
Unlimited Data+ Texts -> $30 per mo
Total Cost: $70 per mo with $50 startup and a 2 year contract
We can all agree that the Nuron is a better price, correct? Of course, some of this has to do with the plan being on T-Mobile instead of ATT, so lets compare with a G1.
The G1 costs $99 with a contract and $370 without, so we'll go for the contract version (it will probably save just a little money).
Phone Cost on Contract -> $100
Even More (500) -> $40 per mo
Unlimited Data -> $30 per mo
Unlimited Texts -> $10 per mo
Total Cost: $80 per mo with $100 startup costs.
Over two years, the G1 will cost AN EXTRA $640.00!!!!!!!!!
That is a hell of a lot of money for a slicker UI and WiFi.
Good info thanks for sharing with us.
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i'm also have post about nokia nuron
http://mobilephone5.com/
not sure if engadget should keep beating on the price factor.... cuz its like 115 bucks unlocked at dell and 99 on t-mobile prepaid at costco... its a heck of a deal for a full functional gps handset if u ask me. best thing being its just 30-40 $ more than contract price...
So... Just a quick update on this product. Naysayers were waaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy off base. This 5230 has blown up at T-Mobile. After asking reps in my local store, they gave me following:
Price: Cheapest touch with all the features.
GPS: Free! Every customer who purchases the device loves the Ovi Maps. The other option is TeleNav which is a steaming pile, or Google which does not work in no signal areas. Ovi does because the maps are loaded on micro.
$10 data: Customers love spending less money for 99% of the same features. Thanks for the breakdown hexpoll...
Overall, they tell me that it is rarely returned with issues, and customers that are confused by Symbian can be helped by spending some time going over it... Should be done when purchased...
Just saying that devices should not always be thought of in super geek terms. Sometimes they are the right device for alot of people. Sometimes they are crap (Tap comes to mind). I think T and Nokia hit the right demographic with this one.
This phone actually doesn't work that well.
I have it. The apps work fine.
Call quality is good. But it freezes up 3-5 times a day.
I don't recommend buying it for any reason.