Nokia has today formally launched the Nokia 5230(image below) and Nokia 5530 XpressMusic(image above) edition in the Indian market. Nokia 5530 XpressMusic was launched in USA few days back and its launch in India was imminent because as it lacks 3G.

Its hard that it would find many takers in USA but it’s the whole different story in India where government bitchiness has ket the 3G plans under the wraps. Nokia might like to make the most of the delay with Nokia 5530 XpressMusic which is priced at Rs. 13,999.

Nokia 5230 is priced at Rs. 10,000 and if you are very excited about the touch screen then you might be interested in it. Barring the touchscreen everything about this handset is lower-middle class. It has a 2MP camera seems pretty outdated now as most companies are moving to 3.2 MP as the standard camera power. The internal memory is 70 MB which can be expanded up to 16GB using a microSD card. As for data connectivity it supports GPRS, EDGE and surprisingly also happenss to have 3G. The addition of 3G in Nokia 5230 while its exclusion in Nokia 5530 is in my opinion a dumb decision. It would have been splendid had Nokia added 3G in 5530 as it pretty much has all the standard features that an active web user like me would have liked.

Nokia 5530 has a 3.15 MP camera with no secondary camera. The camera has a LED flash and can shoot VGA video at 30fps. Both Nokia 5530 XpressMusic and 5230 are pretty much same in design and in most features. Both have the accelerometer sensing touchscreen of 360×640 pixels resolution. Both the devices have 70 MB internal memory and sports Symbian S60 5th edition.

I think Nokia just missed it here. I would have so much liked a device with all the features of Nokia 5530 XpressMusic with 3G. If you just want to flaunt a touch screen Nokia device then both look pretty good. Nokia is pretty naive in the touch screen devices and they seem to be only experimenting here. I am giving both the phones a pass.

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