Nokia 5230 XpressMusic Announced [Touchphone for the Masses With Touchscreen, Fast 3G and no WiFi]

Today, Nokia have announced their latest touchscreen mobile, the Nokia 5230 XpressMusic. Very similar in looks to its big brother 5800 Xpress and competitively priced at 150 Euros (some $215) pre-tax, the new Nokia 5230 features a 3.2 inch touchscreen, fast 3G networking via HSPDA networks, and enough features to confuse with a higher end touch phone.

The display is a 640×360 touchscreen and the camera has been scaled back to 2 megapixel. It lacks Wi-Fi and true GPS, but still has the same Symbian S60 5th Edition smartphone OS that powers the Nokia 5800XM.

Since it is, after all, an “XpressMusic” phone, it features the standard 3.5mm headphone jack and works as a pretty decent media player. The Music Edition of the phone (which is expected to cost some $370) will feature one year of “all-you-can-eat” music downloads from the Nokia Music Store.

The 5230 does lack external playback controls like those on the other XpressMusic devices. Though it has only a few megabytes of internal memory, it can support microSD cards of upto 16GB.

Available just in time for Christmas in either silver, black, red, pink, yellow or bright blue, thew new Nokia 5230 XpressMusic is expected to cause some tight competition from the $99 iPhone 3G if we’re to consider that it may come out priced lower than that after carrier subsidies.