Nokia 5800

Nokia 5800: Great Music at Your Fingertips

Touchscreens are really very popular nowadays, with many phone manufacturers rushing to put out these kinds of phones on the market.

One such mobile phone is the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. Now, Nokia can hardly be called a newcomer to the mobile phone race, and the 5800 is also not their first time to play around with a touchscreen interface, either.

Sporting a 3.2  inch, 16:9 display with a 16M-color TFT LCD with 360x640 pixel resolution, the phone is not bad, not bad at all. Running on the 5th edition Symbian S60 OS with an ARM 11 434 MHz processor and a SDRAM memory of 128 MB, the 5800 is indeed a bit of a monster in a compact package, especially considering how low it is on the price bracket. The built in camera is also a bit over the average at 3.2 megapixels with a mediocre VGA video capability. It also has Wi-Fi connectivity as well as GPS features, and has an 8GB external microSD card included in the package (although this really depends on the store you buy it from).

The 5800 also supports an FM radio, a TV out port, and Bluetooth and USB 2.0. Being an XpressMusic phone, audio quality is great, with a standard 3.5mm audio jack port included so you can enjoy your music with the kind of earphones you prefer to use. Typing is also made easier with the QWERTY keyboard that appears when the phone is in a landscape orientation. A surprising plus is the document viewer that can view office documents.

The first versions of the 5800 XpressMusic were somewhat lacking, but Nokia has made up for this by releasing updated versions of the phone’s firmware that repair the undesirable traits of the phone when it first came out.

On the front of the phone there are a total of three buttons you can press, with the rest being part of the touch screen – call, application launcher, and cancel / end shortcut buttons are located at the bottom of the phone. One very noteworthy feature is the quick swap SIM card slot, which instead of being inside the battery is located at the side of the phone, and can be popped in and out of the slot much like the microSD card.

The dimensions are a thickness of 15.5mm, and 111mm x 51.7mm at the long and short side, respectively. And at mere 109 grams due to the largely plastic build, it’s a light phone. Design and aesthetic wise, the 5800 XpressMusic breaks no barriers but performs fairly well too. Like all touchscreens, it’s very clean and streamlined, and except for the shortcut buttons at the bottom, the 5800 is all screen, baby.

Battery performance is also excellent, boasting a very impressive 406 hours of standby time as well as 8 hours and 45 minutes of talk time. Moderate usage will get you approximately three to four days, which isn’t near bad at all. The addition of the Wi-Fi connectivity is a big plus, and it’s always a joy to browse pages on a touchscreen mobile. There’s also both a stylus and a plectrum for you to choose from.

The 5800 is a good all around phone, especially considering the price range it belongs to. It’s packed with a lot of good features, and while it may not measure up to the big boys fighting at the top, it’s still a very good buy.