Nokia 5220

Nokia 5220 Review – A Tri-Band Music Phone That Brings a Whole Set Of Music

The Nokia 5220 is a true entertainment phone with several nice features geared towards providing excellent musical experience for the users. The slim design and slimmer price tag, just makes the 5220 much more desirable. The dimensions of Nokia 5220 are 108 x 43.5 x 10.5 mm. It is a lightweight phone that weighs just 78g which means that you can slip your 5220 easily in your skinny jeans. The standard Li-Ion 1020 mAh battery is very good providing 5 hours 15 minutes of talk time and 406 hours of standby time.

The design of the Nokia 5220 is much different from the other XpressMusic phones and it is an absolute style statement. The biggest competitor for Nokia 5220 is Nokia’s own 5310 because even though Sony Ericsson has several music centric phones, none of the phones could match the specification charts of the Nokia 5220.

The new shape of Nokia 5220 is quite interesting, but the body is whole plastic. The 2-inch QVGA display that can display 262K colors is not very impressive in terms of picture quality, but considering the fact that Nokia 5220 is a midrange phone, the screen is quite welcome. The ambient light sensor above the display takes care of the adjusting brightness levels on its own. On the left side of the 5220, you will find dedicated music keys and the backlit key designations will blink depending on the rhythm of the music. This can be enabled or disabled by setting music lights feature.

At the back of the Nokia 5220, there is a 2 megapixel camera. The Nokia 5220 is essentially a musical phone and hence, the camera is just an additional feature. You can expect the camera to take some decent pictures outdoor; however, under poor lighting conditions it won't do any good because there is no flash. The camera is not poor either with the Nokia proprietary processing algorithm that takes better pictures in various lighting conditions. Video can be taken only in 3GP format and nothing more can be expected.

The traditional S40 user interface is used in Nokia 5220. An interesting tweak here is that when your 5220 is in standby mode, you can customize the screen like that of a PC desktop. This way, there is no need for any annoying wallpaper. Excellent messaging features are introduced in Nokia 5220. The features are organized in a more practical way making this Nokia handset highly usable. The MMS feature is particularly impressive as you can send even an event from your calendar as MMS. The email client is basic and impressive.

The inevitable Nokia 5220 XpressMusic music player is excellent. The new looks of the player is very good and matches the whole design. A2DP support helps you to listen to music using stereo bluetooth earphones. There is also a 3.5mm audio jack for dedicated headset. If you want something more than the stored audio tracks, listen to FM radio. However, there is no visual radio. The Nokia 5220 features a video player supporting 3GP and MPEG4 formats. Even with a good video player, it is not very cozy to view videos in a small screen.

The Nokia 5220 has a good web browser that can be used for surfing using GPRS and EDGE support. A number of preinstalled applications are present and most of them are very useful. Nokia Maps can be used for address lookup even without a GPS receiver.

There is no 3G support with the Nokia 5220. Nokia hasn’t introduced a smart dialing feature in its mid range phones while the other rivals already have this feature. Multi-tasking is not allowed here and maybe because Nokia has reserved this feature for its smart phones. The camera can be activated only using D pad and the absence of camera button is annoying. The lens is completely unprotected and the panel catches scratches quite easily since it made of the plastic.