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The little battery in the the Nokia C5 is rated for 12 hours of talktime and 630 hours on standby. In practice, we found battery life to be pretty good, but we weren't blown away.
It's obviously hard to waste lots of battery on a large screen when you haven't got one, so that goes in the C5's favour, but internet browsing does it no favours, unsurprisingly.
We know that Wi-Fi access chews through battery severely, but it's not like 3G mobile broadband access sips on power. If it takes 20 seconds to open a web page on 3G that would have taken 10 over W-Fi, wouldn't we have saved some battery use?
In any case, we charged the C5 up when we first got it and then spent just over four days using it. During that time, it was occasionally hooked up to a computer, so it did pick some charge.
At the end of four days of talking, texting and much browsing of the Ovi Store and using Ovi Maps, we were just about out of power.
Not bad by any means, but, as we said, it did pick up some charging on the way, and one things in the C5's favour is that it seems to charge very quickly.
Connectivity
As noted, Wi-Fi is lacking. We don't want to harp on about this, and we really do understand why Nokia would leave it off the feature list of a relatively simple, cheap phone, but why then make it so web-centric?
Add in a new contact and want to link them to a Facebook profile? Better have good signal.
Want to see your email messages right on the Home screen? Only as long you don't live in a lead-lined bunker. Or a house made before 1970.
Infuriatingly, the Ovi Store seems to demand updates awfully frequently. We can cope with an app downloading slowly, but why can we not even access the store because the update server won't play unless you've got a strong connection?
So many pre-loaded and Ovi Store apps just seem to immediately try to access the web, even when you wouldn't think they'd need to, that not having Wi-Fi just wanders into the inexplicable.
Otherwise, connectivity is much what you'd expect from the modern mobile. Bluetooth 2.0+EDR features for file transfer, as does USB 2.0 over the micro-USB port.
Connecting to your PC brings up options for Mass Storage (offering access to the memory card), PC Suite for connection to the Ovi Suite, Image Transfer, Media Transfer and Connect PC To Web, for USB tethering.
The reportedly simple drag-and-drop way of adding music is nice in theory, but sometimes the C5 just wouldn't bother to refresh its lists and update with the new files.
In one case we attributed this to iTunes' pointless of the .m4a file extension instead of .aac, but it doesn't explain the tardiness to spot the perfectly viable MP3 files.
