Phone Review: Nokia

By Loh Ving Sung

Nokia 5800 Experssmusic

The 5800 Xpressmusic “Tube” was recently launched here, and we’ll give you an early analysis of the device. The 5800 touchscreen is an all new concept from Nokia, although previews of it showed up initially on The Dark Knight. The phone had a lot of hype, so it was all the more surprising with the low retail price and the good amount of features.

The 5800 boasts a 3.2 inch 640 x 360 touch-screen interface designed to be used with a fingertip, stylus or plectrum, and uses tactile feedback to help users confirm button and key clicks, and it comes with quad-band 850/900/1800/1900 MHz. The 5800’s camera is 3.2 megapixel Carl Zeiss Tessar with dual LED camera Flash. The phone also has an accelerometer, so 4-way auto-rotation is possible. Nokia also threw in A-GPS and Nokia Maps 2.0 support.

The 5800’s predecessor was the 5320 Xpressmusic, which shared similar specs and came six months earlier than the 5800. The 5800 is an XpressMusic series phone, which emphasises on music and multimedia playback. And with added connectivity options such as HSDPA and Wi-FI gives the phone some more zest.

The 5800 XpressMusic runs on a single 369 MHz ARM11 CPU and has 128 MB of RAM. Given the high-resolution screen, this probably isn't the fastest Nokia handset around. But among its touchscreen counterparts, the 5800 has performed quite well.

The phone runs on the S60 Touch OS- the 5th edition S60 been modified to run on Touch UI, with a few minor improvements. The S60 Touch UI has rendered the previous shortcut keys into your four favourite contacts and has a multimedia shortcut key.

Our Opinion:

The Xpressmusic line has been around since 2006 to counter Sony Ericsson’s Walkman series, and its closest predecessor is the 5320 Xpressmusic which shares its high-end functionality.

Nokia seems also to be caving in the copy protection area, after successful hacks on their DRM services (Nokia with Music), prompted the Finns to drop all copy protection for the 1,000 songs inside the phone. Whether this represent a shift in the idea between copy protection and free sharing for phones remains to be seen.

The low price of RM 1,499 makes it extremely competitive among touchscreen devices, with most touchscreen phones closer to the RM 2,000 mark.