Nokia unveils crazy-looking X5 smartphone

The new Nokia X5 announced
The new Nokia X5 announced

Nokia has announced the crazy looking new Nokia X5 smartphone to plug a (previously unseen) gap in its portfolio.

Rather than the standard tablet candybar phones that are cloning one another in the market at the moment, Nokia's new X5 is a square design with a slide-out keyboard.

The phone features dedicated media control keys, a 3.5mm headphone jack and a 5MP camera with LED flash, so it's not a terribly-specified device.

Nokia x5

It's also got a 2GB microSD card in the box to supplement the 200MB onboard memory, which can obviously be upgraded, especially if this does land in the UK as a Comes with Music device as well.

Shake it, Spin it, Bop it...

If you own an iPod Nano and get irritated when you're walking and the song suddenly shuffles due to being shaken too much, well, that could happen with the Nokia X5 as it supports the same feature, except this time you SPIN the phone like a DJ to activate the service. No, we don't know how either

You can also shake the phone to find out how many unread messages you have too – so if you're like us get ready to run and hear the word zero through your earphones over and over again.

Nokia has given the X5 a release date of some point in Q3, with a pre-tax price of €165 (£135), although we're still yet to get firm information over a UK release date.

In related news, Nokia has also upgraded/downgraded the X6 – it now comes with 8GB of internal memory and should sell for around £190 when launched in Q3.

Via Nokia Conversations

Gareth Beavis
Formerly Global Editor in Chief

Gareth has been part of the consumer technology world in a career spanning three decades. He started life as a staff writer on the fledgling TechRadar, and has grown with the site (primarily as phones, tablets and wearables editor) until becoming Global Editor in Chief in 2018. Gareth has written over 4,000 articles for TechRadar, has contributed expert insight to a number of other publications, chaired panels on zeitgeist technologies, presented at the Gadget Show Live as well as representing the brand on TV and radio for multiple channels including Sky, BBC, ITV and Al-Jazeera. Passionate about fitness, he can bore anyone rigid about stress management, sleep tracking, heart rate variance as well as bemoaning something about the latest iPhone, Galaxy or OLED TV.