When the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic launched, it was easy to see that the price point and feature set would have made it an awesome phone for Nokia to make some moves in the U.S. market. The full touchscreen, 3.2 megapixel camera, built-in GPS, and standard 3.5mm headphone jack all add up to trump most of the other smartphones, or at least match them. Unfortunately, Nokia wasn’t able to get either AT&T or T-Mobile to carry the phone, though that hasn’t stopped the 5800 XpressMusic from being extremely popular anyways.

Today, though, Nokia announced that T-Mobile has finally agreed to pick up the Nokia 5230, renamed to the Nuron. The Nokia 5230 is basically the 5800 XpressMusic with a 2 megapixel camera and sans WiFi, and Nokia has added support for T-Mobile’s funky 3G band, which is great news. The T-Mobile version of the Nokia 5230 passed through the FCC back in November 2009, and we’re glad to see it finally come to fruition.

Unfortunately, neither Nokia nor T-Mobile have released pricing information, and that’s going to be the key here. If the Nuron launches at $50 or less with a contract, it could stand to make huge waves. Also, I’m glad to see that T-Mobile is taking an open approach to the Nuron, choosing to launch it with Ovi Maps built-in, rather than locking the feature out. It will also have Nokia’s Ovi Store included, which gives access to thousands of apps that are, on average, cheaper than those found even on Apple’s App Store!

The Nokia Nuron is planned to be available from T-Mobile online and in their retail stores in the coming weeks.

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Even though it seems quite old, given its target market, I think the Nokia Nuron will sell well. I’m anxious to see how T-Mobile markets the phone, though. Historically, AT&T has done a horrendous job of marketing their Symbian-powered smartphones as little more than cool dumbphones, but T-Mobile has done better, in the past.

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Yesterday I shared with you 10 things that I’ve found Android does much better than Symbian. However, there’s more to the story, so today I have a list of 10 things that my Symbian-powered touchscreen phones do much better than my Android-powered HTC Eris, which is currently running Android 1.5. Obviously this isn’t a complete list, but it’s things that stand out to me after a few months of actively carrying both phones.

This morning at CeBIT in Germany, Nokia unveiled what I would call its masterpiece – the C5. The Nokia C5 won’t impress many of our Symbian-Guru readers – it’s a small candybar smartphone with a pitiful 2.2-inch QVGA display and S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2. However, it’s loaded to the hilt with features, both hardware and software, and aimed squarely at the entry-level crowd that Nokia has been wooing with S40 handsets for years.

Nokia’s built-in Software Update is a gold mine for new updates to preloaded applications on your Nokia device (like Nokia Messaging and Ovi Maps), but every now and then, some weird new applications make their way into it like the Memory Organizer for the Nokia N97. Today, while checking it on the Nokia E72, I found a new update available called “Single Sign-On Device Enabler”, a 644kb file that is said to provide a single sign-on functionality for applications using a Nokia Account.

A Nokia Support Discussions thread says that “It fixes a bug that makes OVI Maps V3.03 crash when you try and set it up with your Nokia account. It possibly cures a bug when setting up an OVI Mail account in Nokia Messaging as well.”

If that’s all that it does, I’m rather disappointed. I hoped that this application would finally take my sign-on Nokia Account credentials the first time I use them in any Ovi application, and apply them to all the others. For example, if I sign-in on Ovi Maps, it would automatically use my details on the Ovi Store, Nokia Music Store and Ovi Files. Yet I have no way of verifying if this is correct because I have my Nokia Account set on all these applications already.

Did the Single Sign-On Enabler appear in the Software Updater on your phone? If so, did you notice any benefit to having it installed?

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I’ve been using an Android-powered HTC Eris from Verizon for over a month now, and it’s been quite an interesting experience. I’ve wanted to check out an Android-powered smartphone for a while now, and honestly, I was dead convinced that after using one, I would hate Symbian forever. While that’s obviously not true, I have come across several things that Android completely dominates Symbian on, and wanted to share them with you.

During the 2010 Mobile World Congress, a company called Distimo gave a presentation, showing off their findings when comparing the top 6 mobile app stores. These include the Apple App Store, BlackBerry App World, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog, and Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Distimo compared numerous aspects, including number of apps, breakdown between free and paid apps, and average selling price of applications across the stores.

So, how does the Ovi Store stack up? Well, we all know it’s not the biggest – not by a mile. At the time of the study, Ovi Store boasted 6,118 applications – precious few compared to Apple and Android, but roughly the same as BlackBerry and Palm combined! Interestingly enough, Ovi Store has the fewest number of free apps – this is great for developers – Ovi Store users are conditioned to spend money – but bad news for users, as they’ll have to hunt harder to find free applications for their Symbian-powered smartphone.

The most interesting slide, however, is shown below – this compares the average selling price for paid applications across the various stores. Immediately you’ll notice that two stores stand out as over 2x as expensive as their peers – BlackBerry and Windows Mobile users should have their wallets at the ready. Apps on the Ovi Store sell for an average price of only $3.47. That’s $0.15 cheaper than the iPhone, and only $0.20 higher than the Android Market. The days when Symbian users overpaid for applications, it seems, are over. It should be noted that this study was looking at the U.S. versions of these app stores, specifically.

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After several weeks, Nokia has finally released the highly-anticipated v40.2.005 firmware update for the North American 3G variant of the popular 5800 XpressMusic touchscreen smartphone. This update is rather huge, and brings a number of features that should have been on the 5800 XpressMusic to begin with. You’ll be pleased to find kinetic scrolling throughout the phone, autoswitch between numeric and QWERTY keyboards, and a new homescreen similar to the one found on the 5530.

The new v40.2.005 firmware update is currently available for the 5800 Navigation Edition, product code 0591814, but is being rolled out for the generic 0577454 shortly, as well. If you’re willing, you can simply change the product code on your Nokia Symbian-powered smartphone and then download the update through Nokia’s Software Update tool.

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While the Samsung i8910 OmniaHD has been out for over a year, it is still an impressive phone based on its features. The massive 3.7-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen display is basically unmatched, and its 8 megapixel autofocus camera and HD video recording are, too. Thanks to our friends at iUnlock.com, I’ve gotten ahold of a Samsung i8910 OmniaHD to use for a little while. This is my first non-Nokia Symbian phone, and I’m quite interested to see how the overall experience compares to say, the N97 Mini.

Here’s the unboxing video -- the packaging is quite simple, especially as compared to Nokia’s Nseries smartphones, but gets the job done.

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Overall, my first impressions of the hardware are good. The phone is large, but thin, considering all the guts it has stored inside. The build quality is awesome, although I’m not a fan of the high-gloss piano black paint job -- it traps fingerprints far too easily and results in a smudged-looking phone.

The Samsung version of S60 5th Edition is, as expected, mostly similar to what I’m used to on my 5800 XpressMusic or N97, with the exception of the icons and a few of the applications. I’ll be exploring more of the applications experience, as well as the multimedia, as I get the phone setup.

Unfortunately, one area in which Samsung falls flat on its face is with desktop support, specifically firmware updates. The i8910 was shipped to me with a slightly old firmware installed, so that I could have the user experience of trying to install a firmware update through Samsung’s PC Studio (which is basically a licensed version of PC Suite). Unfortunately, as I am on Windows 7, there was no easy way to get this to work. After countless hours and trying numerous workarounds (including a Windows XP virtual machine), I gave up, and simply used the ‘Symbian ROM Flashing Tool’, which is definitely not an official application.

It’s really sad that I had to go through such trouble simply to get an officially-released firmware update installed to my phone. Hopefully, if Samsung continues to release Symbian-powered smartphones, they make use of the OTA update feature and eliminate this silly need for desktop computers to update our mobile computers.

Now that I have the i8910 all updated, I’ll be using it as my primary phone for a few days, to get an idea of the real experience. What sorts of things should I be testing out? What would *you* like to know about the Samsung i8910?

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The Symbian Foundation is already made up of a ton of awesome companies, but one more recently joined the ranks – SRS Labs. If you’re an audiophile, you’re likely already familiar with SRS Labs – their research in audio signal processing is well known, and they are currently featured in countless consumer electronics, including the majority of the brand-name HDTVs. Many computers also use SRS Labs’ technology to deliver a superior audio experience for users watching movies, enjoying music, or playing video games.

Now that it has joined the Symbian Foundation, SRS Labs has the opportunity to join the governance of the Foundation, and can also take over as the package owner for any number of sound-related parts of the Symbian platform. That’s definitely music to our ears.

My Symbian-powered phones already produce awesome audio through both the standard 3.5mm audio port and the built-in speakers, it’ll be completely awesome to one day, hopefully, have the added benefits of SRS Labs’ technology making that experience even better.

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As of sometime this week, I’m shutting this site down. I’ve followed Nokia’s Internet Tablets since the 770, through the N800 and N810, and spent several months with the N900. I’d be lying if I said that Nokia hadn’t made some significant progress with the N900 – for some folks, it’s likely the perfect mobile device. For me, it’s terrible.