Don't be fooled: the Nokia 5000 phone may look like a true XpressMusic phone, but it's not. Instead, Nokia's covered up the spots for the dedicated music buttons with some green paint, and threw in some okay features for the price - 1.3 megapixel camera, MP3 ringtones, FM radio, Bluetooth. In other words, an honest-to-goodness Series 40 phone. Then again, it has a retail price of 90 Euros, which most likely reduces to zero with any plan. Expected ship date: second quarter of 2008.

There are relatively few ultra-budget sliders, so the fact that the Nokia 2680 slide even exists has to count for something. Nothing too crazy here, though - it's a dual band slider that gets 3.36 hours of talk time (860 mAh battery) and has a kerappo camera (VGA, 0.3 megapixel). You do, however, get a nice choice of colors: slate gray, night blue, orange, and violet. Also compatible with the Nokia Hearing Aid accessory. (75 euros, shipping in third quarter)

That slide must eat up lots of battery, because the Nokia 1680 classic's meager 700 mAh battery gets a monster 7.6 hours of talk time. Again, dual band with a VGA camera, loudspeaker, IM, and a potentially useful application: English-Chinese dictionary, available only on China/APAC models. But hey, 50 euros for almost 8 hours of battery life seems like a pretty decent investment. Expected shipping date: second quarter, 2008.

So in all, a decent roundup of the cheapie phones.

Tags: 1680 classic, 2680 slide, 5000, phones

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