Top five Nokia phones of 2010

2010 has been an impressive year for Nokia. It saw the debut of its richly re-designed Symbian operating system, which was reborn as Symbian^3 and the launch of one of the most hotly anticipated devices in recent times with the N8. Putting aside the cutting-edge, Nokia also kept up its commitment to quality devices at all price-points. We thought we'd take a closer look at its years work and give you our top Nokia releases of 2010.

Nokia N8 - Nokia's N8 is one of the most talked about phones of the year, and has quite possibly changed the face of the mobile industry for good. With an unsurpassed 12-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and a xenon flash, 720P video capture, a mini HDMI TV-out, Gorilla Glass display, plus a multitude of other features, the device's hardware really lives up to the hype. If you can deal with the slightly underwhelming operating system, the Nokia N8 is definitely worth a look.

Nokia X6 – The X6 8GB is one of Nokia's mid-range phones, and packs in a huge amount of high-end features for a device in its price-band. It sports a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen with Gorilla Glass display, 5-megapixel camera with auto focus, Carl Zeiss optics, dual LED flash and video light, plus 8GB of internal storage, which means you can snap away to your heart's content, and still have space for your music, whilst looking stylish and not breaking the bank.

Nokia E5 - The Nokia E5 is a communicator which would please any user, be it for business or pleasure. With an excellent Qwerty keyboard, browser with Flash Lite 3.0, document editor, as well as a 5-megapixel camera, this little handset is a great addition to the Nokia arsenal. If you're operating within a budget, or you simply feel like treating yourself to a free gift with your new mobile, you'd be hard pushed to find a better device for your money.

Nokia C6 - In the current market, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the hardware keyboard is going the way of the dinosaur, with many devices offering touchscreen only. Thankfully Nokia has bucked the trend with its new C6, which offers a full landscape slide-out Qwerty making it a texters dream. It also sports a 3.2-inch resistive touchscreen, support for MicroSD cards up to 16GB in size, a 5-megapixel camera with auto focus and an LED flash, plus built in apps for Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk and Windows Live Messenger, which means you'll never be out of touch.

Nokia C7 - The C7 is one of Nokia's most recent releases, hitting the market back in September, and has proved to be a popular device. Sitting at the top end of its mid-range, the C7 is one of the cheapest handsets on the market to record 720P video. It also features an 8-megapixel camera with fixed focus, dual-LED flash, geo-tagging and face detection. Another impressive addition is the 680 MHz processor with dedicated GPU, which should be able to handle any games you wish to download from the OVI store. All in all, the C7 is a very impressive device, which will keep you at the cutting edge, without leaving you poorer than a church mouse!

It's been a year of flux for Espoo's finest. Nokia has (rightfully) gained huge plaudits for its hardware and a few rolled-eyes for its software, but overall the company has upped its game and shown that it still has more than a few tricks up its sleeve in the smartphone game. What particularly impressed us was the company's ability to deliver hugely impressive devices at comparatively low prices and this trend looks set to continue into 2011, which also sees the launch of the company's new MeeGo OS, an operating system that looks a dead-cert to wow the public when it reaches the shops in March. So stay tuned, there's a lot more to come from Nokia yet.