The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Mobile Phone is more than just a phone. It is a mobile disco, a photo studio. With music playback time up to 35 hours and side volume keys to tailor the audio level to the situation, this phone includes seamless music experience providing connectivity options to link up the music player to home and car stereos. Additionally, it features true 16:9 high-definition widescreen optimized to provide great mobility for your music and 3.2-megapixel AF camera with dual LED ensures detailed images that you can share. Apart from all these, you can explore the Internet and upload your pictures as well as videos to web with integrated online sharing.
Software
Software used in the phone is S60, so if you were hoping for something else you'll be sorely disappointed. Nokia's done "just enough" to turn the traditional interface into a touchable one with version 5.0, sizing up icons, adding finger-friendly buttons in lieu of traditional menu items and so forth. What Nokia hasn't quite figured out is consistency, requiring double taps in some places, single taps in others. Scrolling through most lists requires dragging a scroll bar, pulling down as the list flies up, but the browser has touch and drag scrolling. Nothing's too frustrating or unreasonable, but this is no seamless experience.
What's new is a touch-sensitive button above the screen that drops down the Media Bar for access to music, movies, photos, the browser and sharing. Not life changing, but quite convenient. There's also a new home screen with a "Fav Four" of sorts across the top and little else. Tap that friend, and you can get a quick look at recent calls, messages and even related RSS feeds. Pretty neat if you're a loner, but there's no way to add more than four friends, or view similar info for your regular contacts that don't make the cut. Luckily, the traditional S60 home screen is also available.
For text input you have four options: handwriting, mini QWERTY keyboard, full screen QWERTY and alphanumeric keypad. The first two are stylus-based (that mini QWERTY is truly mini), while the other two are only available in landscape and portrait modes, respectively. Like we said in the hardware end of things, the resistive touch means using the tips of your fingers instead of the pads, which we find a tad frustrating, but the keyboard in landscape mode is truly gargantuan, and after an hour or two of learning we're guessing you could rattle off some pretty lengthly emails or Great American Novels. Luckily, if you're a T9 fan there's nothing stopping you from keeping the phone in portrait mode and rattling off text messages with the touchable alphanumeric keypad, and the phone is frankly too narrow to work well with QWERTY in portrait. The handwriting recognition looks good enough, but we revert to a 2nd grade writing level whenever we pick up a pen, so that stylus is staying firmly in its holster.
We're not convinced the touchable browser is a step up over existing WebKit implementations on Nokia's other handsets, since the tap to zoom function is slow and unreliable -- and no, you can't select text from web pages to copy and paste. Panning around the page is also jittery, perhaps a tad worse than the G1,nobody has managed to pull off iPhone smooth yet in this department. We were using a slightly early software build, so some of these problems might be fixed in the final version, but it wasn't encouraging. Still, there's no denying the advantages of viewing the web on a 640 x 360 LCD.
We tested out an accelerometer-based driving game, but it was overly sensitive and no-fun-at-all -- though we're guessing that wouldn't be a hard fix. The graphics looked pretty good, though. Movies are potentially this phone's killer app, but you'll have to do the conversion just right to get smooth playback at full resolution. We did see some video shot with the phone (that Sea World shot in the gallery) and it looked pretty good.
Conclusion
If you haven't picked it up by now, Nokia isn't going after the power users here. The phone will be marketed under Nokia's "Live" banner, and really concentrates on the most basic communications -- calling and texting -- with a whole bunch of multimedia piled on top. Nokia's Comes With Music helps on that end of things, and the screen certainly helps with video, but this is no iPhone when it comes to to solid media integration or full-featured media player apps. On the communication side, we're sad to see Nokia almost burying some of its S60 advantages. Everything's still there, but Nokia didn't put the gruntwork in necessary to really take advantage a next-gen interface as it relates to keeping track of emails, social networking, IM and the correspondences of more than four people. All that said, Nokia isn't claiming that the 5800 is the be all end all, is releasing it with a very aggressive price point (€279 unlocked), and promises more where this came from.
The phone ships this fall in Europe, and will show up next year in the States without a carrier, though hopefully it picks up one soon a $50 subsidised price tag could turn this thing into a hit if the US carriers don't sit on it too long.
Nokia 5800 Specifications
- 3.2-inch touchscreen display with 16 Million colors
- 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus
- Quad-band (850/900/1800/1900Mhz) GSM/EDGE radio
- 3G UMTS/HSDPA
- Bluetooth 2.0
- WiFi
- GPS
- 3.5mm headphone jack
- TV-out port
- 140MB on-board storage
- 111 x 52 x 14.5 mm
- 104g
More screenshots
We're almost clear of the aughts. Just one more week, and we get to leave this decade behind for good. But before we do, it's worth taking stock of the absolute worst gadgets these last ten years have given us.
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