They say a change is as good as a break, and N-Desk promises plenty of change, completely dressing up your Nokia C5-03 in a whole new outfit. We've been having a play around to check out what it has to offer.
Check out the Nokia C5-03 Review Roundup
The Nokia C5-03 works well with Symbian S60 5th edition, striking a good balance between power and simplicity in a package that's both attractive and easy to use.
But sometimes we can all do with a change every now and again, and that's where N-Desk comes in. It completely overhauls the look and feel of your Symbian S60 phone, replacing the familiar homescreen layout with an app-grid setup as favoured by certain rival mobile platforms.
This switch happens the instant you launch the N-Desk app, and while the overhaul only takes a few moments it completely changes the character of the phone.
You can choose to have your apps and icons arranged on the homescreen, in columns of three or four and in either five or six rows depending on what suits you.
Either way, apps and icons that don't fit on the main homescreen are automatically moved sideways onto additional screens – another new feature not present on the Nokia C5-03's standard interface. As you'd expect, switching between screens is a simple matter of swiping left or right. Throw in a new lock screen and you've pretty much covered the full extent of N-Desk's talents.
As such, there's nothing overly offensive here, yet the whole thing comes across as slightly awkward and clumsy. That's partly because in setting up the whole icon grid effect, N-Desk pretty much converts anything and everything it can find into an icon and slaps it onto the homescreen seemingly in random.
In our case that meant a total of 55 icons, all sitting on the surface level rather than arranged into a sensible menu structure. You can get around this by arranging similar icons together into sensible groups and sub-folders, and it should be said that N-Desk does its best to give you as many settings as possible to fiddle around with.
But the reality – and the ultimate let-down – of it all is that the moment you actually tap on one of those icons, or press any key at all on the Nokia C5-03, you're back in the familiar world of the standard Symbian S60 interface. Whichis no bad thing, of course, but it does leave N-Desk looking unavoidably shallow, like the cheap facade of a movie set.
Overall, it's a harmless distraction that'll hold your attention for a little while for its novelty value, but if you're anything like us it won't be long before you grow bored of the gimmick and revert back to the Nokia C5-03's standard look.
DOWNLOAD: N-Desk
Size: 0.30MB
Price: Free
