Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

I ran the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic to a lot of stress test to dig beyond the touchscreen hype and found some surprisingly great features as well as shortcomings. Let me share with you why I thought the Nokia 5800 falls short of expectations but will remain on top of a lot of people’s must-buy list.

Make and Construction
When I first read that the Nokia 5800 has a 3.2 inch (360×640 pixel) display screen. The three buttons at the lower part of the screen serve as shortcuts (Call knob, App Launcher and Cancel/End button — from left to right.) The other keys on the side include a dedicated camera button and volume controls. The SIM card slot (usually placed inside the battery compartment) is found on the left side along with the microSD card slot for easy access.

There’s a well placed slider-lock at the center-right side of the device that serves as a screen lock/unlock mechanism (easily reached by the right thumb or the left middle finger when holding the phone).

Aside from the glass screen, the entire device is made up of plastic so it feels light for its size. It’s a little thick at 15.5mm. I think it would have been nicer to the grip at 12mm or 13mm. The phone’s casing feels solid but battery cover suffers from the usual creaks (pretty common with NSeries phones). The hard-rubber carrying case is nice and the plectrum, which doubles as a stylus, can be attached to the case to avoid being misplaced.

Connectivity and Mobile Web

The Nokia 5800 comes with all sorts of wireless connectivity - 3G/HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS — so it’s all set in that department.

Nokia’s built-in browser is generally good, especially on smaller screens especially that of the E63 and E71. Of course, they had to do something different for the 5800’s bigger screen but I felt the real-estate wasn’t maximized so you don’t get a great surfing experience. The browser is fast and displays flash files, but doesn’t render pages with javascripts well. The all-important back/forward buttons are also missing. Despite that, the pages load fast and the scaled images and texts are crisp (almost as good as on Opera Mini).