Nokia X5 TD-SCDMA

• One of a pair of TD-SCDMA phones to be announced for the Chinese market along with a variant of the Nokia C5, the Nokia X5 is a fairly conventional music smartphone that's a little bit more upmarket, than the C5 and which should appeal to a younger customer base.

• You might well be wondering what TD-SCDMA actually is. Basically, it is a Chinese alternative to the WCDMA / UMTS standard, used only in mainland China by China Mobile. This follows a somewhat odd decision by the Chinese government to have all three major mobile networks using different 3G technologies - China Unicom will use WCDMA and China Telecom will use the CDMA-2000 standard. The reason that TD-SCDMA is a big deal is that China Mobile is the largest mobile phone operator in the world with over half a billion customers, although subscriber rates for 3G are relatively tiny still.
• At the moment, we don't know for certain if there will be a version of the X5 outside of China, but there is no reason why this handset cannot be sold into markets worldwide as much of the underlying technology is the same as European phones.
• The Nokia X5 is part of Nokia's "X Series" range of handsets, roughly equivalent to the old XpressMusic sub-brand. It has a 2.4" 240 x 320 pixel display on the front, a 5 megapixel camera on the back, GPS support, a multimedia player and a 3.5mm audio socket.
• This is a Symbian S60 smartphone, like the C5, which offers a reasonably good range of applications in a very familiar form factor. Traditional monoblock design smartphones are currently rather out of fashion, even though there is a large part of the market who want access to smartphone features without having to muck around with touchscreens.
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• othe back has dual LED flash and can capture VGA resolution video at up to 30 frames per second, which would be good enough to upload to YouTube.. if YouTube wasn't blocked by the Chinese government.
• Talktime is quoted as up to 7.6 hours on TD-SCDMA which is impressive for a 3G technology, the handset itself weight 120 grams and measures 113 x 50 x 15mm.
• Nokia say that this version of the X5 should be available during Q2 2010 in China in "multiple bright color offerings".