Review of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone

This is the first Nokia handset to run S60 5th Edition – a touch-enabled update to their popular S60 3rd Edition user interface (UI) found on many high-end Nokia handsets.

Although this may be their first true touch-enabled handset it is not marketed as an iPhone killer, but instead aimed at the mass mid-market.

The package

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic comes in a black box with bright circular splashes of colour. On opening the lid, you are presented with the handset itself. Removing the handset and top layer of the box reveals all of the extras.

The package come with an assortment of extras:

• Power cable
• USB Cable
• TV Out Cable
• Stand
• Headphones & Music Control Adapter
• Case
• Stylus
• Plectrum!
• User Manuals

The plectrum is quite an interesting inclusion – the triangular piece of plastic attached to the phones strap provides another way to interact with the touch screen instead of the stylus or even your finger!

The hardware

The first thing that you notice about the Nokia 5800 is that it doesn’t have a keypad. This is because this is Nokia’s first touch-enabled handset. It has a clean look – dominated by it’s large touch screen, with a front-facing camera top-right and 3 slightly raised buttons at the bottom (pickup call, menu, and end call).

The top of the handset has the power on/off button, Power Adapter, 3.5mm headphone jack and a Micro-USB port and on the side you can find the camera button, keylock switch and volume rocker.

The phone fits nicely in your hand, but with the lack of keypad the big touch screen does somewhat make the handset feel long. The build quality feels very sturdy, and seems like it could take a knock-or-two unlike some other Nokia handsets currently on the market.

Touch Screen

The Nokia 5800 is all about touch and with the S60 5th Edition interface the handset delivers that quite nicely. Nokia have provided some tools to help the touch experience along with an included stylus and plectrum. I do find having these a bit old-school, but there are some areas of the touch interface that don’t work very well with a finger – the scroll bar on the right-hand-side being one!

The new user interface (UI) seems to work well, and is basically a touch-enabled version of the standard S60 UI that most Nokia users will be familiar with.  If I am being honest it is a little clunky, but it works.

The Nokia 5800 uses resistive touch technology which means that you have to press down on the screen as you would a normal button to make an action.  Those of your familiar with the iPhone, which uses capacitive touch technology, may take a while to get used to this as you cant just tap the screen! When selecting something your are also given feedback (like the click of a key) by a quick buzz from the vibrate mechanism in the handset – you’ll either love it or hate it.

Software

The software on the Nokia 5800 is pretty much as you would expect with any S60 3rd Edition handset, but one of the joys is that its great for video playback.  The package came with a small fold-out stand that supports the handset when laid horizontally – brilliant for watching videos.

The Nokia 5800 is also supported by BBC iPlayer which means that you can catch-up with your favourite BBC TV shows on the lovely 3.2in screen.

Camera

The Nokia 5800 has a 3 megapixel camera supported by a dual-LED flash.  Simply pressing the camera button on the side of the handset will start-up the camera application. Image quality is generally good, provided that you are in good light conditions, although the white balance is poor as you can see from the snow picture below:

Compared to other handsets

As you can see from the image below, the Nokia 5800 is a nice sized handset.  By itself it does seem long without a keypad, but sat against other phones you can see that it is really just a standard candybar phone.