Review Of Nokia 5130 XpressMusic- Great For Music But Low On Other Features

Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Simple design, sleek, great music features.

Thumbs Down:

The phone doesn’t have any other great feature other than the music player, the 2 MP camera is pretty bad, keypad buttons have cheap plasticy feel.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology:
GSM

Band:
GSM 850/900/1800/1900 (Quadband)

Phone design:
Candy bar

Caller ID:
Yes

Other features:
GPRS (General Packet Radio Service), EDGE (Enhanced Data Rates For Global Evolution), Internet Browser, Radio Data Service (RDS)

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Display
2 inch TFT LCD, Resolution – 320 x 240 pixels, 18-bit (262000 Colors), Features – Wallpaper, Screensaver.

Supported Audio Formats
AAC, WMA, MP3

Flash Memory
1 GB – microSD (External-Bundled)

Connector Type
1 x Headset jack – Mini-phone 3.5 mm, 1 x Micro-USB

Other features
Alarm Clock, Calendar, Reminder, Calculator, Stopwatch, Countdown timer

Camera
2 megapixels, 4X digital zoom, Video recorder resolutions 176 x 144 (QCIF)

Digital Video Formats H.263 video and AMR audio

Playback Digital Video Formats
MPEG-4, 3gp, AMR audio, H.263 video

Downloadable Content
Themes, Wallpapers, Games, Video files Ring tones, Screensavers, Audio files, etc.

Ring Tone Formats
WMA, MP3, MIDI, AAC

64 polyphonic ring tone memory.

Supported Email Protocols
POP3, IMAP4, SMTP, WAP Protocol Supported – WAP 2.0
Messaging / Data Features – XHTML Browser, Macromedia Flash support

Razzle Dazzle:

The Nokia 5130 XpressMusic has options for two colors, aqua/silver and red/black. We got the aqua/silver model in our test centers. As you can see the phone is all silver, the rim and the middle button is in aqua blue color. The phone looks attractive and there are the lights on sides of the phone which wake up when you start the music. The keypad of the phone has a cheap plasticy feel and Nokia could have done better in this department. Other than this, the phone is tiny and will fit easily in your pocket. Behind the phone there are some haphazard dots which make up the speaker of the phone.

Inside Dope:

Once features of the phone started increasing people have began to use it as a device which can click photos, play music, etc. It then became economical to use a phone which has all such features rather than get a separate phone, camera and music player. Now people are getting serious and buying such mobile phones and hence manufacturers are also taking advantage of this.

Once it became clear that a mobile phone could replace a PMP, people started to show more interest and this makes companies like Nokia bring out such phones which are great music players as well.

Now 5130 XpressMusic from Nokia has been aimed at music enthusiasts, this will be clear for the name itself. And though the phone is low on other features you get a good phone and a great music player. The other plus side is that not much hardware has been put in for other features except the music player so the cost of the phone has been kept under control. As a consumer what you get is a cheap phone with great music player, good phone and nothing else. We think this will go down well with the music enthusiast is on a stiff budget.

The Nokia 5130 XpressMusic has a two inch display which gives a resolution of 320X240 pixels. The resolution is good considering the size of the screen and even though the screen is small it doesn’t looked like a cramped display. Images and text are clear on the phone but the display will go down to its heels when you take it in bright sunlight. This is a LCD display and icons will not be visible when you take it out there. The display supports 256,000 colors. You can change the font size of the screen and also the color of standby font. You can also change screensavers, display themes, light effects, wallpaper and alert tones.

Below the display is the numeric keypad which has a cheap plasticy feel. This is the only thing that is a bit ugly about the otherwise sleek and pretty phone. The keyboard is flat on the surface and the keys aren’t sufficiently raised but that shouldn’t keep you from typing comfortably on the keypad. Keys are spacious and you will have no problems with it.

Above the numeric keypad of the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic is the two soft buttons and the call and call end buttons. The middle navigation phone has the same color as the rim of the phone. We got the aqua/silver model for testing and it was all silver except for the rim and the navigation button. If you get the black/red model, the navigation button and the rim will be red and rest all is black.

There are physical buttons around the camera – there are three keys for dedicated music control, with these keys you can directly wake up the application for music without going in to the menu and all. There is also a volume rocker and a 3.5 mm phone jack where in you can plug you favorite set of head phones. But you won’t complain much with the bundled set. This music made phone has good set of head phones. We were happy to find the microSD card slot on the sides of the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic. Mostly you have to dig inside the phone to access the card because it is behind the battery of the phone or beneath the battery cover. A card slot on the sides of the phone gives you easy access if you want to change or remove the card.

There is also USB port and charger port on the bottom of the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic.

The internal memory of the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic is about 30 MB and you cannot go beyond this for storage of contacts. But we think that 30 MB is a lot when it comes to storing contacts as those tiny characters don’t take up much space. Remember that your SIM card can store 250 additional contacts. A single contact can take six phone numbers, URL, e-mail address, name of the company and job title, nickname and formal name, notes and birthday. You can put your friends into groups depending on how you know them and you can give individual ringtone to a contact. Other than this there is a feature which lets you pair up a photo with a contact so that his face flashes when he calls you. There are about 23 polyphonic ringtones in the device but you can always use you MP3 tracks as ring tones.

Other features on the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic include world clock, text and multimedia messaging, countdown timer, to-do list, vibrate mode, stopwatch, alarm clock, calculator, unit and currency converter, etc

The music player is the best features on the otherwise low feature phone. The sound quality of the phone feels great we got a couple of tracks going to check the phone. Controls on the phone are simple and you won’t have to go digging. The player supports album art. There are also other features like shuffle and repeats modes, stereo widening, equalizer, an airplane mode which lets you listen to music when you are flying and playlists. The phone has measly 30 MB internal memory and supports expansion up to 2 GB. You can minimize the phone’s music player to access other applications on the device. The phone will stop playing music if there is an incoming call and will resume once you are done talking.

For transferring music onto the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic there is USB cable or card reader. You get Nokia PC sync software which has software, it shrinks the size of the file with a very little quality loss. We think you will be using this feature a lot because this phone has just two GB of expandable memory. The phone also has built in FM tuner.

The Nokia 5130 XpressMusic has a camera which is without flash or self portrait, but we will remind you again that this is a budget phone, apart from the great music there is nothing out of the box in the phone. The two mega pixel camera can take maximum resolution of 1600×1200 and the least is 160×120. Features for the camera include five color effects, three quality settings, self-timer, 4x zoom, four light sensitivity modes, landscape and portrait modes and three options for white balance. The camera can take resolutions of 128×96 and 176×144. If you want to send the video as MMS you won’t be able to clip more than 38 seconds but you can record more in standard mode. Colors looked washed out on the phone’s camera and there was image noise too. Photo quality was below average just like a typical 2 mega pixel camera. Video quality too is below average.

Though the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic is not that good for gamming, there are games like Bejeweled, Pac-Man/Ms. Pac/Man, Diner Dash 2, 5th Grader 2009 and Midnight Pool 2. All these games are demo versions and you will have to pay a fee for full versions.

Other features on the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic worth mentioning are voice recorder, stereo Bluetooth, Web-based e-mail, instant messaging, voice commands etc. You can use the external card memory that you have put in the phone as a mass storage device.

The Nokia 5130 XpressMusic was finally tested for call quality and it was excellent. We could hear clearly what our friends were saying and they could hear clearly what we were saying too. There were no problems with call quality. Speaker phone calls are bound to attract some background noise, just like most phones but the sound was clear and audible. Sound will distort on the speaker phone if you push it to the limits.

The Nokia 5130 XpressMusic has a rated talk time of about six hours and the stand by time is 12 days. If you charge the battery to its full and then play only music then Nokia claims it will last about 20 hours.

Nitty Gritty:

We will say what we have said before; the Nokia 5130 XpressMusic is great for music and nothing else. This can be your cheap replacement for iPod neither it has the big memory nor it can play videos like the Apple’s product. But for music this is a good substitute.