Nokia 5230 or Samsung Monte

cwthomas

I'm looking to move over to a touchscreen type mobile with decent internet capabilities and narrowed my search to the 2 stated in title (the iphone is way, way out of budget!!).

When I started looking into this I set a budget of around the £100 mark and I can pick up the Nokia for £70 (Tesco payg) or the Samsung for £110 (O2 payg).

The main usage of the phone will be text messages (approx 200 per month), internet whilst out and about / at work, voice calls (few and far between). I'm trying to keep the monthly spend to £10.

Does anyone have anyone who has has experience of these models advise me of the pluses and minuses (I realise at this price point it aint going to be all good...).

Craig

5867dude

I personally have the Nokia 5230 and the only faults are the lack of Wi-Fi and the camera is quite poor but is adequate. The Samsung Monte looks better on paper, but the Nokia 5230 has a much higher screen resolution so it will look sharper. It (Nokia 5230) also has Ovi-Maps which, whenever I have used it, has been flawless and can replace your TomTom or similar.

cwthomas

Thanks for the info 5867dude, looks like I'm leaning towards the Nokia.

Meepster

I've got the Nokia 5800 (the 5230's big brother) and love it. The only real downsides are the touch screen can be a bit erratic at times and there is sometimes a bit of a delay when starting apps. Nokia maps is a real bonus (I have recently stopped using my Tomtom because of it). Music quality is awesome, internet is great (especially if you download Opera mini) and if you do a lot of texting, you wont have any problems using either the traditional mobile phone layout or full screen qwerty (the small qwerty and handwriting are a bit more tricky). Would highly recommend it...

oliver84_2

One more for Nokia 5230.

secretmsg

Nokia 5230 is a great phone,having 16M colors where as monte only 256k color.

http://www.gsmarena.com/compare.php3?idPhone1=2909&idPhone2=3117

Here is the comparison..

If you are much into texting then Nokia 5230 will be a good one as monte is using capacitive touch screen which makes a bit harder for texting..

secretmsg

and yes if you are buying Nokia 5230 from carphonewarehouse , the phone will be unlocked,you will be paying £68.95 + £10 topup

Quanz2

I would recommend the Nokia 5230 - i got this as a birthday present the other week. Its a great phone - I did a bit of research and if your using it to listen to music (according to one review i read) the sound quality is as good, if not better than the I-Phone. I got it because i wanted to listen to Spotify on my phone and it was probably the cheapest phone i could find to do that.
Here's an indepth review of the 5230.
http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_5230-review-427.php