Nokia C5 Boasts Social Networking FeaturesNokia C5 Boasts Social Networking Features

Nokia introduced the C5, a watered-down smartphone that lacks a touchscreen or a qwerty keyboard, but with other advanced features that will make its $183 price look like a bargain.

Introduced Tuesday at the CeBIT show in Germany, the candy bar handset, which is in the vanguard of Nokia's new Cseries, utilizes the venerable Symbian operating system and features a 2.2-inch screen, a 2-GB memory card, an FM radio, and a 3.2-megapixel camera.

Nokia is promoting the social networking and sharing features of the compact phone, noting that Facebook and MySpace status updates and favorite contacts are easily visible on the handset's phonebook. "The new Cseries represents the core of Nokia's portfolio, focusing on social interaction between friends and family," the company said in announcing the phone.

The phone operates Symbian S60 3rd edition, meaning that tons of applications will be readily available to users as soon as the phone is available in some markets in the second quarter. The C5 has 50 MB of internal memory and will ship with Ovi Maps 3.4, which includes free lifetime navigation features. E-mail and instant messaging are also available.

While the C5 lacks some of the most advanced features of high-end smartphones, it has the advantages of its tried and true Symbian OS, familiar to developers and consumers alike.

Last month, Nokia teamed up with Intel to create Linux-based software for very advanced smartphones. Called MeeGo, the new platform merges Intel's Moblin OS with Nokia's Maemo OS. The new platform is targeted at developers who wish to write apps across a variety of devices, ranging from smartphones, netbooks, tablet PCs, TVs, and in-vehicle infotainment systems.