Calling music fans: Nokia 5235 Comes With Music announced

A new Nokia phone joins the ranks of Comes With Music phones - meet the descriptively named Nokia 5235 Comes With Music. It is based on the Nokia 5230, but features Nokia's all-you-can-eat music download service.

The Nokia 5235 Comes With Music sports almost the same features as Nokia 5230 - the 3.2" resistive touchscreen with nHD resolution (360x640 pixels), the built-in GPS with A-GPS and Ovi Maps. The 2MP snapper of the Nokia 5230 dazzled us with its video recording prowess - VGA@30fps is quite unusual for a 2MP camera - and the 5235 Comes With Music matches that.

It may not be a part of the XpressMusic lineup, but the Nokia 5235 Comes With Music does well for itself - dual-band 3G with 3.6Mbps HSDPA for fast downloads, a microSD card slot for cards up to 16GB to store the songs and up to 33 hours of music playback.

The Nokia 5230 has a 3.5mm audio jack too, so the only thing that's missing is the dedicated music keys. Nokia has a good track record in the audio quality department, so there should be no problems. The Nokia 5235 Comes With Music runs Symbian S60 5th edition and offers other Ovi goodies besides Ovi Maps - Ovi Store, Ovi Contacts and Ovi Mail too.

The Comes With Music service, which lent its name to the Nokia 5235, allows unlimited free downloads of songs from its catalogs for a given period of time - in the case of 5235 it's either 12 or 18 months. When that period runs out, the songs are yours to keep. They are DRM protected though so you can't really play them on other music players.

There are two color schemes for the Nokia 5235 Comes With Music - White with ice-blue tinted chrome rim and Black with ice-blue tinted chrome rim. It is expected to begin shipping in the first quarter of 2010 with an asking price of 145 euro (214 US dollars).

Touchscreen Samsung M5650 Lindy surfaces

Corby on steroids!

The previously unknown Samsung M5650 Lindy has gone on sale in Portugal

The touchscreen Samsung M5650 Lindy handset has surfaced online bearing a remarkable resemblance to the Samsung S3650 Genio Touch.

The original Corby Genio Touch certainly had a small price tag and a touchscreen interface working in its favour but the spec list is very entry-level, and the colour schemes a bit much for some to bear.

Clearly heeding these factors on the M5650 Lindy, with a more “sensible” colour range and a serious bump in the specs department including a 3-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi and a forward facing camera for video calling.

Rounding off the improvements is the inclusion of up to 7.2Mbps HSDPA connectivity and dedicated music playback keys.

According to GSMArena.com, the Samsung M5650 is already available to buy, but we certainly haven't seen it on our shores yet. It has however seemingly trickled out with little fanfare in select locations; with one Portuguese operator currently offering it for €149, down from €159.

It sounds like a fairly interesting prospect for the price-tag; it's only a shame that there's no 3.5mm headphone socket, particularly if Samsung is putting the M5650 Lindy up against the likes of the Nokia 5530 XpressMusic.