Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

We at Tech2 have been covering the 5800, Tube, Bat-Man phone, i-Killer or whatever else you’d like to call it, for a long time now - ever since the rumors and fuzzy images surfaced. If you haven’t, well you’re either indifferent enough to have avoided the hype altogether or well informed and patient enough to have waited this long for its arrival. But does it live up to all that it was expected to do? Allow yours truly to lend you some insight into that.

Form Factor
To recap from the description of the handset I gave in the preview – the 5800 may not be a sleek handset but it is well designed. Its dimensions are 111 x 51.7 x 15.5mm and it weighs in at just 109g and the only figure that I had a teeny tiny problem with initially was its depth. Nothing I didn’t get over very quickly though. The display is brilliant and very clearly visible even in direct sunlight. The 3.2-inch touchscreen sports a 360 x 640 pixel, 16 million color display resolution.

Once again I’d like to say, I personally am not a fan of the color the handset’s body is set in. I have yet to see the Blue colored model and decide. I do like the concealed hot swap SIM and microSD card slots built into side and the screen lock slider that’s well placed on the other side. The placement of the micro USB port, charging slot and 3.5mm earphone socket on the top is a good idea as it makes it quite convenient for all connectivity. I especially like the drop down ‘media-bar’ that can be accessed via a small touch sensitive key located above the display.

I still like the design though. It feels just like a normal candy-bar handset without the wide design like most other touchscreen handsets.

Features and PerformanceInterface

The 5800’s tweaked out S60 version touchscreen User Interface is well constructed and can be used virtually with no help from the stylus whatsoever. The only time you’ll actually require the stylus is when you’re using the extremely intuitive handwriting option for entering data. A couple of negatives with the UI is that the accelerometer is a little too sensitive and that can’t be adjusted. Secondly there’s a 2-3 second gap and no transition effects every time the orientation is changed. The glitch could be easily fixed with a software update I’m hoping.

Lastly, selecting links on a WebPage is a little difficult as sometimes the status bar doesn’t appear so it’s a little confusing figuring out if the next page will appear or not. Other than that I think the touchscreen interface even with the double tap is well constructed. It’s even better with the tactile screen feedback. That sensitivity can be adjusted. Something that Nokia has not been able to curb is the dreadfully long wait period when attempting to open the video center section to view all video files. The more videos there are to load the longer the wait. My advice, open them from the file manager section. Flick controls is also present for scrolling through images.

The various modes of data entry are also well designed with a full QWERTY keypad that can be used only in landscape to optimize the use of the large screen, a smaller QWERTY keypad that can also be used in portrait, a normal mobile alpha-numeric pad for the conventional users and of course handwriting recognition. The handset also uses a very useful contacts bar - it allows users to have a few select contacts saved on the desktop with personal images etc., and when selected, a drop down box will reveal all the recent correspondence with that particular contact.

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Media
Being an XpressMusic edition handset the 5800 is built for multimedia and I have to say it handles all media VERY well. To start off, the music player is great for sound quality at a pretty high decibel level. EQ presets as well as an 8 band customizable graphic EQ and Stereo Widening are available to help make things a little more interesting. I’m not a fan of the earphones included, but you can of course use your own if you want or feel the same. The handsets FM radio had very decent reception while on my commute and took no more than 16 seconds to search and save all available channels as presets so that’s another plus point. It also has a voice recorder and a separate application for Podcasts.

It was a pleasure watching videos on the widescreen display (16:9). Once you find a converter for your videos to accurately adjust them to acceptable formats and screen size you’re good to go. The only problem is that videos didn’t seem to resume playback from the point it stopped which I found a little odd considering all of the new S60 handsets have that feature. It wasn’t too big a deal as forwarding was very easy using just a finger to slide across the progress bar. The Video Center menu also allows you to add sites with video content for convenient viewing.