Nokia 5800 Xpress Music – a rival to Apple iPhone

Thumbs Up:

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music has compact design with 3.2-inch LCD touch-screen display. It features with Wi-Fi, 3.2-megapixels camera and 3G-support.

Thumbs Down:

The user interface needs improvement for better navigation methods and input. Nokia Music Store is not available in the United States.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: WCDMA (UMTS)/GSM
Band: Quad-band of WCDMA (UMTS)/GSM 850/900/1800/1900
Phone design: Candy Bar
Caller ID: Yes
Other features: Wi-Fi, GPS/A-GPS, inbuilt stereo speakers, 3G support

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music has features centered towards multimedia. The embedded operating system is Symbian OS. The 5800 Xpress Music phone has 81MB of internal storage and microSD card slot to support 8GB cards. The supported wireless interfaces are Bluetooth 2.0 and IEEE 802.11 b/g. The phone is capable of conference calling. The speech codecs are EFR, AMR and FR.

3.2-inch diagonal LCD display has 640×360 pixels resolutions to support 24-bit (16.7 million) colors. The display illumination color is white. Nokia 5800 Xpress Music has 3.2-megapixels camera that captures still images of 2048×1536 resolution in JPEG format. The digital video formats are MPEG4 and 3GP, and video recorder resolution is 640×360 nHD.

The advanced features of Nokia 5800 Xpress Music are Class 32 EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution,) HSCSD (High Speed Circuit Switched Data), HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), embedded Java applications, inbuilt full HTML based Browser, GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), GPS (Global Positioning System) and A-GPS. The phone also supports POP3/IMAP4/SMTP email protocols.

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music has three connectors: 1×Audio/Video out, 1×3.5mm headset jack mini-phone and 1×micro-USB. 1320mAH lithium ion battery has a life of 408 hours idle standby time and 540 minutes of talk time. The 5800 Xpress Music comes with nifty stand to perch the phone on its side while watching videos. The other accessories inside the package are an 8GB microSD card, extra pen stylus, carrying case, wrist strap with stylus plectrum, 3.55mm headset, video output cable and USB cable.

Razzle Dazzle:

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music has the same candy bar design as that of Apple iPhone and Samsung Omnia. The phone has rounded corners with black and burgundy color-scheme. The 5800 Xpress Music measures 4.37-inch tall, 2.04-inch wide and 0.61-inch thick and weighs around 3.84 ounces. The phone provides comfortable and sturdy feel while taking in hand.

Inside Dope:

The cellular giant Nokia is launching phones in dozens. However, its first touch-screen mobile with gusto is Nokia 5800 Xpress Music that is a rival to Apple iPhone. The 5800 Xpress Music offers various multimedia features. Still its user-interface and inputs needs refinement to exploit the touch-screen technology fully. Until Nokia launches its Music Store in United States, the 5800 Xpress Music phone cannot deliver complete functionality like Apple iPhone with iTunes integration. The phone is available unlocked for $399. There are certain drawbacks of the 5800 phone that are not acceptable at such large price range. We will talk in detail about each aspects of Nokia 5800 Xpress Music.

3.2-inch LCD display has 640×360 pixels resolution that supports 16-million colors with 16:9 image aspect ratio. The display is not big as that of iPhone. The colors are vibrant and bright with sharp graphics and photos. You can change the backlight time, font size and brightness. The display will go dark on raising the phone to ear during the call. The brightness will automatically adjust as per light in the ambience.

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music has standard menu system with grid format. The sub-menus are intuitive, but Nokia has not completely optimized the user-interface for few applications. The 5800 Xpress Music has inbuilt accelerometer that changes the menu view between landscape and portrait mode by rotating the phone. Most of the phone applications have this accelerometer feature.

The touch-screen is quick responsive, so you can use the pen-stylus or your finger on the display. It might confuse some fresh users because some items respond to double taps, whereas some needs single tap. During test, we had to wait for few seconds to launch an application and then we realized that further taps were required. We would like to have unique touch system across the phone. As you have to use thin scroll-bar so you feel scrolling needs some acclimation. Comparatively, Apple iPhone provides fluid scrolling across the phone. You can adjust the calibration at the 5800 Xpress Music. The touch-screen display of Nokia 5800 has vibration-feedback, but you cannot customize the intensity.

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music has two icons of dialer and phone book on its home screen. You can also add favorite contacts or shortcut bar on home screen for the instant access. Nokia has added large touch-screen virtual numeric buttons, but there are no alphabets on the virtual keys to dial already stored contact. On dialing, the display will show options for mute, speakerphone and hold.

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music has virtual touch-screen full-QWERTY keyboard with spacious keys. This keyboard comes in landscape mode, so you will get small space to type the message. There is a separate virtual keyboard for symbols and numbers, which comes in portrait mode. You can switch between writing alphabets and language alphabets with a touch at bottom. The dedicated return key, back button, large space bar and shift keys are also available. You can scroll the already written text by tapping the selected area on the display. For regular text-users, it is not good to write text with multi-tap dance. The 5800 Xpress Music also offers mini-QWERTY keyboard and handwriting recognition.

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music has a Talk Key, an End key and a dedicated menu control located beneath the display. The menu button will display multimedia menu to launch videos, music, photo gallery, and options for sharing files online etc. A Volume rocker, camera shutter and handset-locking switch are located on right spine. The SIM card and microSD card slots are on the left spine. The charger port, a micro-USB port, 3.5mm headset jack and dedicated power button are located on the top. 3.2-megapixels main camera lens is on the back above the flash, whereas second VGA lens for self-portrait sits above the display at front.

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music can store the contacts as per available memory and SIM card can hold more 250 contacts. Each contact entry can include 10 phone numbers, three email addresses, three video-calling numbers, an anniversary and birthday, notes, spouse and child names, an assistant name with phone number, department and job-tile, three URLs and notes. You can separate the callers in groups and pair them with a photo and one ring-tone. The phone offers numerous ring-tones and you can use recorded audio/melodies as ring-tone.

The basic features of Nokia 5800 Xpress Music are speakerphone, notepad, voice recorder, currency and unit converter, notepad, world clock, alarm clock, calculator, calendar and vibrate mode. The multimedia and text messaging feature is equipped with capability to erase multiple messages at once. The advanced feature set includes full HTML based browser, integrated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth with stereo profile, application and file managers, full GPS support and access to Nokia Maps, speaker-independent voice commands, USB mass-storage, instant messaging and synchronization to PC for photos and music.

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music has inbuilt FM Radio and music player that is comparable to Nokia’s most N-series handsets. The music player has simple interface and offers album art and various settings. You can activate stereo-widening, use bass-booster, adjust volume balance and select one of five-equalizer settings. There are also options for airplane mode, create/edit play-list and support for pod-casts. You can plug the 5800 Xpress Music to computer using USB cable. During test, the computer recognized the phone instantly and it was easy to synchronize the phone with Windows Media Player. You can select file transfer modes between simple drag-and-drop mode and USB transfer mode. You can buy tracks from Nokia Music Store depending upon your region; however, Nokia has not launched its Music Store in the United States till now.

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music has full HTML based browser that has straightforward interface. The scrolling through pop-up menus can be tricky if you do not know where to tap exactly. You can view photos on a page, save bookmarks, search for keywords, access RSS feed and keep multiple pages open simultaneously. The web browser does not have Flash support. The complete browsing experience of Nokia 5800 is way behind Apple iPhone.

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music has 3.2-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens, which capture photos in three resolutions. The settings menu will explain maximum printing size and number of photos to capture for each resolution. The camera has features of gridlines, self-timer, six scene settings, 3x digital zoom, auto-focus and four shutter tones. You can also adjust the sharpness, contrast, color tones, exposure metering, ISO level and white balance. There are four flash modes- Flash Always On, Flash Off, Automatic and Red-eye reduction. Nokia 5800’s camcorder also records video in five quality modes. Its setting menu will inform about each setting and maximum recording time. The camcorder has features of color tone, white balance and night mode. You can mute the sound while recording and use flash for steady light.

We captured some photos and recorded video for testing the camera. The photo quality was good. The colors were sharp with some image noise. The video quality was also good and acceptable for 3.2-megapixel camera. You can use video-out cable to display the recorded video on TV.

You can customize Nokia 5800 Xpress Music with inbuilt collection of profiles, alert tones and display themes. More options and ring-tones are available to download from Nokia via web browser. The 5800 Xpress Music also has support for Real Player, application to sync calendar and contacts with other Nokia devices, shortcut to online “My Nokia” account, menu for accessories setup and settings wizard. The Nokia phone has two games Global Race Racing Thunder and Bounce, both of which uses accelerometer.

For testing, we made some calls through quad-band based Nokia 5800 Xpress Music via AT&T service. The call quality was good. We received loud and natural sound with some static interference. However, the audio has echo-effect at high volume-levels. The callers also received good sound with little background noise. Some of the callers could tell that we were using cell phone.

The speakerphone calls were not good. We had to push the volume to its limits to hear our friends. The callers also faced difficulty to hear the voice at their end. The Bluetooth headset calls were better with same quality like normal voice calls. The music quality was also satisfactory and comparable to Nokia’s other Xpress Music models. The included 3.5mm stereo headset also provided very good sound.

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music has 1320mAh lithium ion battery that has a life of 8.8-hour talk-time in GSM and 5 hours in 3G. The idle standby time is 16.7 days in 3G and 16.75 days in GSM. The 5800 Xpress Music offers 1.5 days of continuous music play, video playback for 5.2 hours, 5.6 hours video-game playback, 3 hours video calling and 3.4 hours web browsing.

Nitty Gritty:

Nokia 5800 Xpress Music has attractive feature set and good design. This touch-screen phone has to face competition in the market.