Nokia 5800 XpressMusic review

Time for a Nokia 5800 review, I think.

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone has been eagerly awaited, as it’s been touted as Nokia’s first real iPhone-killer. Sporting a fancy new touchscreen user interface, the Nokia 5800, also known as the Nokia Tube before its release, is a mid-range phone that’s designed purely for fun and media while offering a similar user interface experience to the iPhone.

Better still, it comes with Nokia’s Comes With Music service, which lets you download an unlimited number of tunes from its music store for an annual subscription.

So with good looks, a promising user interface and some nifty features, all from a phone that won’t break the bank, the Nokia 5800 looks very promising indeed. Read on for the full Nokia 5800 review to find out if it lives up to its hype.

Nokia 5800 overview

The Nokia 5800 is a candybar phone that operates solely via touchscreen. There isn’t even a physical keypad on the 5800, so like the iPhone, you have to do everything via its touchscreen. Nokia clearly aren’t as confident with their touchscreen recognizing your fingers, though, as they’ve included a stylus, something that the iPhone doesn’t have (Apple are too cool for stylii!)

Primarily, the Nokia 5800 is aimed at media fans, with a particular emphasis on music. Everything about the phone is therefore geared around providing easy access to an unlimited amount of music and videos for your listening and viewing pleasure!

Nokia 5800 Features

User interface

One of the things that had everybody so eager to see this new phone was the 5800’s new touch-based user interface. Nokia have dabbled with animated user interfaces before on their phones, but they’ve never combined an animated interface with a touchscreen in quite the same way as they have with the 5800.

For example, when browsing through your photos, you can go from one photo to the next just by swiping the screen. Although the iPhone has been doing this since the day it was first released, this is the fist time that a Nokia phone has done it, and so you can see why people have been calling this the iPhone killer.

The Nokia 5800’s interface isn’t as good as the iPhone’s though, but then the phone is only a mid-range device,and so costs a lot less than the iPhone. In fact, at just £250, the 5800 costs so much less than the iPhone that you can buy it outright for the same price as the iPhone and just 3 months of charges!

As far as text entry is concerned, you have to use a virtual keyboard. These can be notoriously flaky,but luckily the 5800 gives you several options with which to enter text: a straight QWERTY virtual keyboard, T9 text entry, or handwriting recognition though its stylus, which seems to work quite well.

Nokia 5800’s music player

The Nokia 5800 was designed at the outset to be a music playing mobile phone, and in this it doesn’t disappoint. It’s not just the abilities of its music player that’s so good, it’s the user interface that enables you to access all your tunes so easily, plus Nokia’s new Comes With Music service.

The music player itself comes with a variety of codecs (mp3, SpMidi, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, and WMA) and the usual playlists, equalizer, and so on. The 5800 alos comes with an FM radio and 3.5mm standard headphone jack.

However, it’s doubtful you’ll ever need the radio, as the Comes Wtih Music service is just so compelling. Similar to iTunes ion that it’s an online store of millions opf tunes, Comes With Music lets you browse, listen and download tunes directly to your phone over the air. However, unlike iTunes, once you’ve downloaded your tunes, you can keep them forever and freely swap them between your phone and your PC.

Better still, you don’t pay per track; rather, you pay an annual subscription,which gives you access to whatever tunes you want. The tunes don’t expire after your subscription does, either – you keep them forever.

Nokia 5800 camera

The Nokia 5800 is designed primarily for use as a media player phone rather than a camera phone, and so its camera and video features aren’t quite as good as on some other phones. The camera, for example, is only 3.2 megapixels, although it does come with a variety of different settings for getting the best photos you can, as well as Carl Zeiss optics.

In addition, with dual LED flash, it’s actually surprisingly good at taking photos in low light conditions. As such, although it may not have the largest megapixels, it’s certainly able to hold its own compared to many other camera phones on the market.

Video camera

As well as the main stills camera, the 5800 also comes with a video camera, which isn’t too shabby. Capable of shooting at 640×480 pixels at 30 frames per second, it’ll certainly produce some good results.

You can also watch video from a variety of different formats, including MPEG4-SP, MPEG4-AVC, WMV9, and MPEG4-SP nHD.

Web browsing

The Nokia 5800 is an ideal device for browsing the Web. Its touchscreen offers a 3.2″ 640 x 360 display with 16 million colours, which means Web pages are rendered in a clear easy to read format. Any web page that could do with a bit of magnifying can easily be zoomed in simply by double tapping the screen at the appropriate point. The screen can also be dragged around by holding a page with the finger and moving it around, much like the iPhone.

The browser is the WebKit browser that Nokia use in all of its higher end phones, and having used this browser for over a year in my Nokia E90, I can tell you that it really is one of the best mobile browsers on the market today. Combing WebKit with a touchscreen interface is an excellent touch that should amke browsing the Web on the 5800 simplicity itself.

Video of the Nokia 5800 in action

Pictures, as they say, paint a thousand words, so here are a few videos of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic in action.

The Nokia 5800 vs the iPhone

The Nokia 5800 was compared to the iPhone when it was announced, simply because of its touchscreen abilities. However, as Nokia themselves are quick to point out, it’s not an iPhone killer, and it’s not meant to be – rather, it’s a great little mid-range music phone that just happens to have an excellent touchscreen display.

It’s interesting to note that Nokia still haven’t released a phone that competes head to head with the iPhone. The 5800 comes closest so far, but that’s only because of its touchscreen abilities. Until Nokia comes up with a touchscreen phone with the same level of music abilities and Web browsing as the 5800, combined with GPS and an application development environment similar to the iPhone AppStore, we won’t see the two companies going head to head.

Summary

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is a fantastic music phone. It combines the ease of use and intuitive nature of the iPhone’s user interface with the feature set that Nokia is known for in a phone that must be one of the bargains of the Century! At just £250, the Nokia 5800 is almost too good to be true – touchscreen controls, great Web browsing, camera, video camera, accelerometer, Wi-Fi, 3.5G HSDPA – the list goes on!

It’s extremely usable, looks great, will do pretty much whatever you want a phone to do, and is extremely good value. 9/10.

Dialaphone have an even bigger Nokia 5800 review if you feel the need to read more!