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.
When the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic was released a little more than a year ago, we thoroughly panned it in
-- put simply, it felt undercooked and uncompetitive in a world where
webOS, iPhone OS, and Android were all realities, regardless of Nokia's
existing smartphone dominance through much of the world. More than a
year later, we're now presented with the Nokia Nuron,
a pretty close relative of that first S60 5th Edition device from back
in the day; it's simply a carrier-branded version of the 5230, which itself is a lower-end variant of the 5800.
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.
Nokia Nuron for T-Mobile review
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.
The volume rocker is deceiving, particularly for those not used to
Nokia's quirky way of handling things. Basically, it does absolutely
nothing most of the time, because it isn't used for adjusting ringer
volume -- for that, you've got to muck around with your profile (to be
fair, Nokia does a far better job supporting profiles than most
manufacturers, but it still takes a little more effort than we'd like).
Instead, the rocker only comes into play when you're in a call or
listening to music, or intermittently as a zoom control for some
applications -- though we couldn't figure out a rhyme or reason to how
or where Nokia decided to implement it (it doesn't work in the browser,
for example).
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.
As for software, S60 5th hasn't evolved much from its humble roots -- you certainly won't find anything akin to Symbian^4
here. Many of our complaints from the 5800 carry over, like the mixed
item-selection paradigm (one tap on the main menu, two taps in lists)
and the weak text entry, but the addition of inertial scrolling makes a
surprisingly big difference in everyday usability. The way we'd describe
it is this: current dumbphone users, S60 5th Edition users, and most
S60 3rd Edition users will feel right at home with the Nuron's user
experience, but everyone else -- particularly anyone who's used a Pre,
iPhone, or Android device -- will be a bit stymied by some of the
platform's stranger principles.
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.