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The Nokia 5250, the low-cost touchscreen phone first glimpsed in the Ovi Store last week, has now officially been launched.
Obviously aimed at the cheaper end of the market, Nokia’s official blog makes a big deal about the phone’s music capability, offering with it a free mobile version of Guitar Hero 5 preinstalled.
To carry your downloaded music there’s a piddling 51MB of memory on board, but thankfully you can expand this with a 16GB memory card.
In some countries you will also be able to get Ovi Music Unlimited (previously called Comes With Music) thrown in, but there’s no word yet if this will appear on UK deals.
Spec-wise it doesn’t exactly take your breath away, as it runs the Symbian 1 OS with a 2.8-inch TFT screen and 640×369-pixel resolution. It comes with a 2-megapixel camera, with Ovi Share installed so you can upload your snaps to the web.
But because the 5250 doesn’t have much to drain its power, it offers a fair amount of talk time — 7 hours — and can play music for 24 hours without a recharge.
It will cost €115 (£95) before taxes and operator subsidies. As usual Nokia won’t give a firm UK release date, just a rather vague “sometime in the fourth quarter”, which could mean as late as Christmas.
As far as we can see, the phone looks like it will a replacement for the Nokia 5230, which we schmoozed last year. And it does look a decent bet for the budget semi-smart phone market Nokia already does well in.
Last week the Nokia pumped out the X3 Touch and Type, another cheapish phone that has a combination of touchscreen and keyboard.
Neither will really make much of an impression on smart-phone fans still awaiting high-powered N8 and N9 phones from the Finnish company.
The N8 will definitely have the upgraded Symbian 3 OS, while the N9 has been heavily linked with MeeGo, the fruits of an open-source mobile partnership it has with Intel.
Does the styling and music capability of the Nokia 5250 impress you? Or would you rather the company brings out more spec-heavy phones? Let us know in the comments section below.
