The Nokia 5230 has outsold any single Android phone ever made- and I had never heard of it. Hope you enjoy the video! Get NordVPN here! nordvpn.com/91tech - It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee!
Plzz dont berate the phone. It was a good phone for its price. It was cheaper than blackberry 8520. Tha lanyard used to come for a guitar app, as advertised in xpressmusic, also resistive screen.. that little arrow opp to nokia logo was a shortcut button,.. iphone was xpensive, 4 of these..:D
Games is apart of the Roller Coaster Rush series that later released on iOS and Android. Rest in piece Digital Chocolate, the company is sadly defunct GREAT GAME though.
"i love obscure phones like this" bro you might be the only person on earth who hasn't heard of symbian or nokia smartphones from the late 00s - early 10s
I had heard of various Nokias in general 😂 this one just sold so ridiculously well and I had never known anything about the 5230 in particular- I also think in the grand scheme of smartphones, pretty much anything that ran Symbian is kinda obscure at this point. This phone would have come out when I was 9 years old But I'll admit I'm extremely ignorant, I can say it lol
@@91Tech yes, the review shows how young you are! For us born in the ‘80s, Symbian was very cool! I had a N70 at the time the iPhone came out and sincerely it didn’t impressed me that much because apart from the touchscreen (but we didn’t know if it would’ve been better or worse), Symbian had even more functionality!
@@djsangre When iPhone came out is was a terrible phone. It was a very good internet device (for that time) and had iTunes. But as a phone it was really terrible. It didn't even had 3G. Actually iPhones didn't have 3G for years even though it was the industry strandard at the time. First iPhone with 3G network was iPhone 3G (or was it 3Gs?). Even iPhone 3 didn't have it back then.
@@djsangre I almost closed the video when he said that the signal bar is an X,I owned the Xpress music version of this phone,the speakers on it were amazing for the time,I was in high school and we were listening to music during breaks, Bluetooth speakers didn't exist back then,at least not portable ones, good memories.
Saying Nokia "partnered" with Microsoft is a bit incomplete. Microsoft Trojan horsed them with a former executive who sabotaged Symbian and pushed hard to switch to windows phone before Microsoft bought Nokia mobile and get got a multi billion dollar payout, it was absolutely vicious. The guys name was stephan elop, the story is honestly pretty interesting
This is interesting! I'll have to look into it more- I have to be careful when I do these types of videos because I already tend to go down rabbit holes enough as it is lol, I mean this video alone is 23 minutes. But that might be worth talking about at some point, thank you!
Symbian was slowly of dying before the Elop days though, MeeGo was supposed to be Symbian's replacement before Elop took the seat and axed it, so i wouldn't say he sabotaged it when it was going to be replaced by a gesture based OS, which was kind of ahead of its time in UX/UI
9:54 what you have just stumbled across is the Nokia Guitar Pick. It was to be used as a stylus for the resistive touch screen and was a big part of the XpressMusic branding back then. As for the tiny X on the corner of the screen, thats where your 3G signal bars would be if you had a simcard in the phone.
Yep, feeling real 'smart' after reading all the comments correcting me lol. Ah well, probably a fairly average impression from a Gen Z'er who didn't grow up with a Nokia.
@@91Tech maybe next time you get an old Nokia, unbox it on a RU-vid Live so we millennials can give you its 'quirks and features' so you could use it as research before you make s video about it.
The guitar pick is a stylus. This was during the transition from resistive to capacitive touch screens. Only iPhone had capacitive touch screen that time. Others, including Samsung and Nokia copied the finger-oriented UI of the iPhone but they do not work well without capacitive touch technology. Hence, they had to include stylus, which are interestingly designed to be dangling. See the Samsung Omnia, which ran on Windows Mobile, and its weird dangling stylus.
I even remember having my mind blown when I saw the Nokia X6 for the first time with the same Symbian ui but with a Capacitive touchscreen. It felt like a leap in tech
That's pretty cool! So strange to me as someone who never had a phone like this, but I really like the idea. Nice they would include something like that.
@Adam Foster not sure which region you are in, but that wasn't the case for me. The 5800 XpressMusic came with a Blue or Red Pick based on the phones color, the 5800 Navigation Edition came with a Black Pick and the 5230 came with a Pick as a marketing move to make buyers feel like the phone was a budget 5800
i had one of these!! i also had the nokia c6 with the slide out keyboard,, although i did want an iphone back in those days, but these werent too bad before i got my first proper android which was a sony xperia ray
The C6 was way more modern tho ... it released when Symbian 3 was already out for a while and used some clever design cues to make it feel like Symbian 3 despite being a budget phone with inferior hardware. I love the UI design ideology the used there.
I miss mine, i had several nokias and even the flip phones were good. I would be able to download apps and listen to internet radio on my nokia 6275I that came out a few years earlier. I discovered android when i was was finally old enough to have a postpaid account of my own and switched to verizon and i got the Motorola Droid, fell in love with it almost instantly. Been using android ever since
It seems that you really don't know about Nokia before. Seeing how the nostalgia hit me seeing that phone again in action (it was my first phone purchased using my first salary almost a decade ago), let me tell you about what I remember about it: The Nokia 5230, and its sibling the 5233, were "downgrades" of the popular-model back then of Nokia, the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music phone. I had the 5233, which is quite similar but only sold to specific markets (i.e. Southeast Asia, etc). The "guitar pick" you have mentioned earlier is actually Nokia's wrist stylus bundled with those models since it particularly lacked a stylus stick. Then the hands holding together at the boot up screen is Nokia's company slogan before it was acquired by Microsoft. It was "Connecting People".
I Used Symbian for many years and I liked it. It was capable of multitasking with a minimum RAM. My last Symbian phone was Samsung Omnia HD, great device. Sad that the ex Microsoft boss killed Nokia and Symbian with it.
I did too. Had several Symbian devices until Samsung decided to dominate the smartphone market in 2010 with their first generation Samsung Galaxy devices. I've had Samsung ever since.
Me too, I was a big fan of the Nokia "N" series, especially the full fat Nokia N97, not the mini.... Still got it, but needs a ribbon.. Great phone with slide up screen, revealing a fully functioning qwerty keyboard and other buttons.. Great for long messages/emails etc.... and very durable battery..
Please don't cover any more Nokia's. This video was poorly researched. Lots of other RU-vidrs that have done better jobs at retrospective Nokia phones.
I *love* my Nokia N9. Feel incredible in the hand, and meego has such a cool UI that imo is extremely intuitive. Theres a few phones out there that continue the design legacy somewhat (Galaxy Note/S22U follow a very similar design philosophy, that weird Leica phone looks like a 1020 pureview from another dimension) but I would love to have a modern version of that phone, just a touch larger and with a proper edge to edge display.
There was an update to the phone in it's lifetime where it allowed the user to have an ambient display which also had slide to unlock option. Two options to unlock a phone was a cool way to show off back in those days. I had this phone and I had alot of fun with this installing mods. Yes you heard it right. This phone had mods.
This takes me back to childhood, when my mum used an Orange (no longer existing in Austria) branded Nokia C5-03 with Symbian OS. It was an awesome phone for the time. I still have it
symbian os one of the most compressed simple os that instead of scattering the freakin file of a game or application everywhere in the phone it uses the same installer package as the main source for its emulation while saving like 70% percentage of the storage and ram at the same time .. and is easily you can create your own customization like themes using just one folder as source and an html as install intruction
@@tossancuyota7848 yeah. i always like to customize my father's phone. changed operator logo. changed the theme. have screensaver. have fm transmitter.
@@laporpomatakungsi1513 learn some basic coding then reply back tome so youd know how much garbage code an android and other os have compared to .sis specially the games of those os
I have a Nokia 6280 from 2007 running Symbian OS. No touch screen, physical buttons only, no horizontal, vertical orientation only, no icons, it works with menus. And it still works after all these years.
i used to have a 5800 which is kind of similar to this phone. higher end with better camera, flash, front camera and wifi. i installed a theme to make it look like windows 7 and also changed the boot animation as well. unfortunately i cracked the lcd so it doesn't work anymore.
@@myteam94 if i remember correctly if you hold down green red and the camera button and turn it on while holding these buttons it should factory reset, though I don't remember if it asked for the password or not. maybe give it a try if you haven't already
I had one of those and it's a really really great phone used it for more than 8 years without any problem. It is probably my first mobile to experience internet and use it. Also the first time experiencing Maps and it was just awesome. This mobile even has a stylus left side on the back and you can easily pull it out and use. Slider is a cool feature too.
I also had 5230, black one with shiny metallic border and pink back cover. Atleast here in Finland those phones used to include few different colored back covers in their boxes to choose from. That software was indeed very slow and buggy, my unit loved to crash almost every time someone called, making it just vibrate nonstop until I removed the battery.
Adding in to the guitar pick debacle, when the original 5800 Xpress Music was launched; there were a few music related apps which let users create their own MP3s, or just fool around. One of the apps was a Guitar one, and there were ads and promos focusing on the same. To sum it all up, the guitar pick included had 3 uses for the phone. One was the stylus as many pointed out, 2nd was to be used with the guitar app, third is that it can be secured in the lanyard eye letting the user hang the phone around the wrist.The guitar and music apps were not bundled with Nokia 5230/5233 as these were non “Xpress Music” phones but can certainly be side loaded or downloaded.
@@Claro1993 There is a bit of difference between composing own ringtones on a keypad device and using the touchscreen that has the instrument on the screen which you play using the included guitar pick. There were other music apps as well like Touch piano, Touch Drumset and a flute as well. Of course it was a marketing gimmick for sure.
This is a trip down memory lane! I had another phone from that series, the 5530. That series was the flex in the late 2000's here in Portugal. Who had the 5800 were the boss, because that one had wifi. Mine also had both. The resistive screens had their flaws, but the guitar pick and the stylus included in many phones of that time were the boss. Loved to see that phone again, who had those were the richest!
I remember having one of these in dark maroonish color & i can tell you NOTHING sounded that good when it came to listen music back then, it was groundbreaking how good the audio quality was in these phones. That little thing next to nokia logo on the top right corner is actually a touch sensitive music shortcut, was really useful for me to quickly jump to the playlist.
the "X' on the top left is for the network. That's where the phone used to show network but since you probably don't have a sim in there it shows "X", in fact as far as I can remember all Nokias used to do that, at least all that I have seen
So many memories. I had this phone after I lost an HTC My Touch from T-Mobile. After experiencing a capacitive touchscreen it was an infuriating process adapting to a resistive screen. I got used to it, eventually.
I don’t remember the 5230, but I do have a similar phone, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, the full featured version of the phone, out of the box had a lot of accessories like a phone sleeve, stand, and even a composite video out cable, came with 25 songs from universal music, albeit DRM-locked, and some other promotional material. It was a great phone for what it is, as a music and a video player, and that’s about it.
My first honest to goodness touchscreen phone was the Nokia 5800 which I believe is the more expensive variant of the 5230 (5800 has wifi and a higher resolution camera). I was amazed by the amount of accessories included with the box. It came with spare styluses(one pointed, the other a guitar pick style), earphones, case, phone stand, tv out cable and a freaking copy of a Batman movie! Shot too many photos with it, watched a crap ton of movies and listened to thousands of songs! It was a multimedia powerhouse with its sharp display and powerful speakers. I even installed a variety of custom firmware on it with custom ui animations and such. I loved that device to death. 10/10 would buy again if I were sent back in time!
My father actually works at Nokia. He says that Nokia could've made the iPhone, they had all the resources needed. The only thing Nokia lacked was creativity and thinking into the future.
I had the original version of this phone. The Xpress Music 5800. Nokia recycled that design on several subsequent phones at varying lower price points by stripping out different features (like wifi).
Well, I had more Nokia phones then any other brand combined. My mom actually had the 5230, it's still lying in a drawer somewhere. My last Nokia was the N97 which was an all-round disappointment. It did have an FM transmitter which was neat.
Funny seeing a gen z guy discovering Nokia. I had Nokia phones from the early 2000s till 2011, when I moved to a Galaxy S1 (and have been with Samsung ever since). I think my first Symbian (kind of the smart version of Nokia phones) was in the middle of the decade, definitely before iPhone. It was crazy to be able to connect to the internet anywhere back in 2006....
I'm a gen z too, and my first and only Nokia phone that I owned was the X2-00. I loved that phone. I wish I had more Nokia phones back in the day, but I had many Sony Ericsson phones though (which they were awesome and I loved them).
@@DacLMK I am a gen x... I grew up without mobile phones, my first one was in 1999 (a terrible Alcatel), when I was a college student, my first Nokia in 2003, the 7250, my first phone with a camera (but no videos at that time). I love that thing. As I loved all the following Nokia phones especially my E70 (I still have them all). Was sad to leave Nokia behind but they were too big and proud to move to Android before it was too late, and Microsoft did everything to avoid it, including buying them and wasting $7bn
I'm a gen z and I used Nokia phones in 2007-2012, I got my first Symbian smartphone (used Nokia 6630) in 2010. The last Symbian phones I used as my main phones were Nokia N97 and Nokia 500
For me, Symbian was something amazing, while I didn't have it, I get up a couple of hours earlier, turn on the computer, write down emails, prices, addresses where I should travel (I can't carry a laptop, it's too heavy and too expensive to take), pack a paper map of countri so as not to get lost, I go to another city I buy a map of that city to find addresses (I get lost a couple of times during the day), I come home I type in excel and emails what I did-how much I sold during the day, and then I hear for a smartphone from Nokia, I buy it, install maps, excel, word, mail ... and the next day I go to work only with the phone, I find the addresses, immediately open the mail ,type the prices in excel, while traveling I listen to music from my phone, at the time it was unimaginable-unbelievable I will always remember that Symbian and Nokia. It was a change, after that everything is just improvements.
This was my mom's last non-Android phone. Quite awesome device I must say 😀 The gray button is brilliant, works similarly as Samsung's Edge panels now. If I'm not mistaken, this phone also had a stylus with it! Or maybe the guitar pick thing was supposed to work like a stylus 👀 Also the Rollercoaster Game worked normally at the time and I never experienced that prolonged loading when I had used that phone 😅 I always thought that late Symbian was better than early Android. It was sad Nokia had to ditch the OS when it partnered with Microsoft. Nokia also used a different OS for their Asha phones at the time, which was terrible compared with the one in the 5230.
Loved reading this, fun to here people's experiences with the phone... especially since I have none haha. The guitar pick stylus really came out of left field for me, had no idea. The gray button I will say was a really good idea, especially since basically no one even in more recent years bothered using the top bezel for anything but the front cameras, so might as well stick something there.
Same my mom upgraded from this phone to an iPhone 4 in 2010. The rollercoaster game was phenomenal and the phone was also capable of running java games. I sent them over from my Sony Ericsson W890i. Wonderful days
I still remember this phone back then they were some of first smartphone of people around me The loop yes I remember that even Samsung gave it with their smartphones back in the days
Sometimes watching this channel I feel so old 😅 My second phone was a Nokia 5130 XpressMusic, but for a long time I dreamt of getting one of the Nokia touch smartphones 😂
My mom and Grandma had these! And my grandma's still works! Finally I get to learn more about them! They had them in grey, and they're actually fairly nice, I loved playing the Rollercoaster game
The triangle thing actually serves as a stylus for the touch screen. Also you didn't show off the quick media button on the top left, you can actually touch on it for media. At that time Symbian OS was really good at multitasking especially copy pasting texts from websites. Cheers. #longlivedsymbian
I remember the Symbian OS. I used to be involved with some software for Bible study; it ran on Palm OS and someone in Indonesia ported it to Symbian. Even though the OS no longer exists, the software is still available.
What a cool review. Growing up in Europe, I was fortunate enough to own some of the iconic mobile phones from the early 2000's. My favorite brand was Nokia and I had models like 3310 (the indestructible brick), 6600, 6630, 9500, 3650, 3250, 7610, E61i, E90, N95, 5800 Xpress Music which is very similar to the one in this video and many other models. What a memory and exciting experience I remember that was. Now I'm using one of the latest flagship smartphones with all the bells and whistles but still miss those days when phones had cool physical keyboards and looked different from each other with different screen sizes and case materials.
My cousin had the nokia 5800 xpress music back in the day and I was rocking an E65 (with 3g and wifi!), nokia was huuuge in Mexico, I used ebuddy to connect to my msn messenger account and had luminies installed, we used to exchanged music tru bluetooth (iphones were never allowed to do that) good times! My first android was the OG google owned moto G 1st gen, great phone for the price!!
2 года назад
I used to own 5320, loved it, it was my first touch phone. The only bad thing was the lack of WiFi
Everybody had this when I was in middle school. I had the 5800 which is the same thing but had Wi-Fi. I remember I loved that it had the buttons in the italian flag colors green-white-red. The pick was to use the touch screen since it was so awful that using it with just your fingers was kinda hard. The 5800 also had a stylus. We used to keep the phone in our pocket with the pick dangling from the lanyard outside the pocket. It was like a social status or something.
This was my first smartphone. It didn’t need Wifi. It was released at this weird time where carriers just had free unlimited data. It was so early in the smartphone era that carriers hadn’t realized how much data consumers would be using. I used mine to watch RU-vid basically all day every day back then. So there really wasn’t a need for wifi, as it could handle the most data intensive task at the time, watching video. Any kind of syncing with devices was done with USB.
The screen is what’s known as a ‘resistive’ touchscreen, where you have to physically push it down, not tap. That’s why the input was poorly responding to your touches. I think that’s also the reason for the guitar pick thing, it’s used as a small stylus.
I had a 5800 XpressMusic back in those days (wich was pretty much the same Phone but with WiFi) A friend of mine manged to brick his 5800's display and gave it to me for Parts. Another friend had a 5230 and i vividly remember the day I swapped his Display unit into the my parts 5800 and it worked flawlessly. I got like 50 euros for that endeavour wich I promptly invested at the closest Bar.
Of course I've heard of it, I'm from Finland. I didn't use this specific model myself but I think I might have one laying around somewhere because I think I got a really beat up 5230 or 5228 from my friend once...
Firstly, the grabbing is because Nokia's slogan was Connecting People, secondly what looks like a guitar nail was so that you didn't have to take out the stylus and you could select things with it, battles with the screen to select because it wasn't so much touch for the finger but the phone included a stylus on the side so you could very easily select anything on the screen
The small X in the left corner normally shows your signal strenght, but since the phone is in offline mode (because there is no sim card installed), it shows the X. I bought a nokia n71 ones from a shop that listed the phone "for parts", back in those days, the N series were the best of the best, and the phone i got was sold at the same store for 175 euro's in fully working order. I got it for 20 euro's, which was a great deal! But the phone remained in Offline mode, wether or not there is a sim card installed, i thought i was unlucky and bought a phone with a busted sim card reader, turns out, you can set the Offline mode yourself in Profiles, i didn't know that at the time, but i walked inside a phone shop and i just asked him why this phone is in offline mode when i have my sim in there, 10 seconds later, i saw reception and my carrier name appear on the display! I did a lil dance and the guy asked me why i was so happy, i told him my story and he wouldn't believe me :p great phone! It had 3g, i could watch television on this phone, which was nuts and mindblowing! Great times, the times when phones, were fun!
It's actually incorrect that it couldn't keep up with iOS and Android. Symbian was incredibly feature-packed. Many of its features still haven't been replicated by either Android or iOS to this day. The only reason it failed was Stephen Elop. He did everything he could to sink Nokia's market share, so he stopped supporting Nokia's projects at the time (Symbian and MeeGo), leaked a "burning platform" memo and publicly trashed his company's products so that they would partner with Microsoft, eventually being acquired for an oddly low price of $7 billion.
the little x means that you have no sim card installed on the right is your battery percentage indicator and on the left is your network percentage indicator
Or it can mean that the phone is in offline mode/airplane mode which was a later addition for the Symbian OS. Older versions of the OS won’t let you even boot to the phone without a SIM card.
That one is tough and I was actually having a hard time calling this the '2nd' best selling smartphone. But the figures I've seen are combining the iPhone 12 & 12 Pro, which doesn't really seem fair to me- different size options are fine imo but the phones are too different to combine. But you're right, as a series of phones they're one of if not the best selling smartphones out there.
Ah yes. My old phone. We used to call it as SZEO. Symbian OS was the most customizable smartphone OS at the time. From custom icons, fonts, custom firmware, locking/unlocking device by predefined motion (accelerometer) and so much more to play. Wide range of apps selection like photo/video editing apps, camera FX apps, media players, internet browsers, utilities etc. I used to make my Blackberry friends amazed with this phone.
Those things were frustratingly underpowered. I bought one of the more expensive nokias back in the day for 400 and it was just plain slow and therefore popular games on android and ios just couldn’t be ported over. I also had an Ipod touch 4 back then for half the price and it was so much better at everything that it was laughable how much nokia demanded for their antiquated phones.
Man Nokias were all the rage in the 2000s! Basically everyone in my family had one... Just to name the best ones (the older ones aren't as interesting), my father had the N70, N96 and N97, my cousin had an N95, and my aunt had an N8 ! Those were some very cool phones, I'm happy I got to test them all :)
bro! my dad bought me that phone way back when I was in high school and I remember I had only gotten to experience it for like 2 days before being mugged and have it stolen from me! I remember I was pretty excited when I got it since it was a pretty huge deal to have one back then... this video brings me a pretty strong nostalgia man
I used to have that phone (in black) when I was in high school around 2010. My classmates were drooling over that phone. Made me feel cool back then. 😅
The guitar pick is actually an alternative for its stylus. The 5230 is using a resistive touch screen, that is why scrolling at touch is really terrible
My very first smartphone. Dude, this thing did it ALL from emulation to HQ video playback and had some of the crispest voice quality at the time. It was also tough as hell. RIP Nokia Nuron
Just recently I restored my old Nokia 700 to a brand new state with original parts. That's the phone visible at 5:00, just in black. It was the smallest smartphone at the time with an amoled display, extremely thin and works great. With symbian unsigned app patch applied it is still useful and quite nostalgic, with all the old themes, games and apps.
The one that seemed like a guitar pick was a "stylus" with a style. no pun intended. I had 5230 back in 2010, my favorite mobile from Nokia before I had my Nokia Lumia 800. 5230 is a mid-range touchscreen Symbian back then. the N-Series were the top of the line.
i loved this phone when i was in high school. For 2009/2010, i was excited for the first touchscreen phone i ever owed, and the last nokia. i wish nokia would had gotten android intsead of windows. The pick is a stylus which is cool.
Had E71 for more than four years. It had Symbian S60 v3... I used to play NES Roms and Doom on it lol... The qwerty keyboard was sweet. Probably one of the best phone I ever used.
Still have a 5800 XpressMusic which had the same shell but in black and dark red combo. Came with a stylus, stereo speakers and it was my second smartphone. 2008 seems like a century behind us.
My late mother used to own one of these. I would not say that it was popular here in my country because at the time the dominating Nokia phones were still using keypads. This brings back a lot of memories, I remember I would often play the game where you have a character run using your fingers and just try to get better times. I do not remember any other games we had and it is my first time knowing that the operating system used in that phone was called SymbianOS, which is why I remember it being very similar to Android. Thank you for creating this video and making me relive some nostalgic memories.
Still got the 7710 which has the s90 Symbian which is the first touch screen that was produced for public and the N92 which has the DVB-H digital tv and s60v3 and they are still functioning. The pick that was included on your lanyard you can use it as a stylus.
I have used and still have that phone, it’s got a stylus too. Btw that’s not a guitar pic it’s a stylus also, I sold my iPhone 2g for this one, it’s ahead of its game in that time plus we have file sharing which apple didn’t support , music, clips , downloads, mods, games , etc.
