Pros: Great style, very good audio performance, good feature set, excellent battery life.
Cons: Memory limited to 4GB, no support for Audible format, headset design/execution is FUBAR.
The Bottom Line: The 5610 is a very good phone, which make its shortcomings even more maddening. Does Nokia care enough about the mid-tier market to shoot for a great MP3 phone?
Brian_Igo's Full Review: Nokia XpressMusic 5610 Cell Phone
Of all the things you can do with a cell phone beyond making calls, is any more natural, more right, than listening to music? It's easy to imagine a Reese's-style ad with a phone and a MP3 player smashing together while happy music swells. Two great things that go great together...and this one won't rot your teeth!
When Apple mated a cell phone to the world's most popular MP3 player two years ago, it would have seemingly put an end to competition in the cell phone/MP3 market. If you just look at sales volume, maybe it has. But the problems that kept me from even seriously thinking about an iPhone just after it launched in the summer of 2007 are still here today. Because there's no way to opt-out of the data plan, any smart phone will cost $700 more over a two-year contract, and that's on top of the extra $100-$300 you'll pay up front to get an iPhone. And iPhones means iTunes, which is to MP3 management in Windows what Stalin was to zoning in Eastern Europe.
The good news is that there are a lot of MP3 phone options to the iPhone. The Sony Ericsson W760 (AT&T), LG Chocolate 3 and Samsung Trance (Verizon), the Samsung Highnote (Sprint) and Nokia 5310 XpressMusic (T-Mobile) all get excellent reviews. But we were happy with our service from T-Mobile and I loved the Nokia 5300 slider I bought in 2007, so the natural choice for my next phone was the Nokia 5610, which replaces the 5300 in Nokia's XpressMusic lineup. My wife wasn't thrilled with her Motorola Razr, so I talked her into a 5610, too.
They may be related and separated by only one generation, but the difference in style between the 5300 and the 5610 is the difference between Paul and Mira Sorvino. The 5610 is narrower, much slimmer, and has more sex appeal than the creators of the 5300 probably dreamed of. It is a gorgeous phone, at least until you handle it for a while and the shiny black face collect your fingerprints with enough detail to see ridges and whirls with the naked eye. Wiping it with a clean cloth just smears the oil across the surface. At some point I'll accept that keeping this phone clean is impossible, but right now I'm still in the denial and anger stages.
The 5610 is notably slimmer than the old slider, its total height is just a couple millimeters more than the bottom half of the 5300. It's also a quarter-inch taller when closed, but the open length is identical to the 5300. The difference in the closed length is in the keyboard area. The old phone has a much roomier keypad, the new phone gives up that real estate for a slider bar above the D-pad to toggle to the radio and music player. While the keys are slightly smaller and there is much less room around them, they do feel more defined than on the 5300. It is easier to tell by feel when your finger moves from one key to another. I'd call it a wash for texting, but if that's a priority you probably wouldn't consider a phone like the 5610 when there are so many QWERTY sliders available in this price class.
Controls on the slider are a mixed bag. The NaviSlide slider bar is a big hit in my book. When the keypad is unlocked moving the spring-loaded bar in either direction cycles you through the main window, radio and music player. You can navigate forward and back in those screens using the D-pad and surrounding buttons, but if you hit the slider and go to another screen it will not save your work.
The D-pad has taken some hits in professional reviews for being stiff and imprecise. I haven't found that on either of our 5610's, so that might have been a problem with early production phones. But the surrounding four action buttons have no tactile feedback, and the volume rocker button on the right side of the phone is very small and so recessed that it's practically flush. Strangely, the camera button on the bottom right is the best-defined button on the phone. All told, with the single exception of the NaviSlider bar, the function of the controls on the 5610 are a step backwards from the more clearly defined and well-spaced buttons on the 5300.
The 2.2" screen is bright, sharp, and does a very good job of displaying color. Call quality and speakerphone function is also very good, but the external speaker of the 5610 is a little quieter than the 5300. The quality of the external speaker is good enough for conversations and listening to podcasts, but as you'd probably expect the music quality leaves a lot to be desired. The 3.2 megapixel camera offers acceptable image quality, and the 5610 is much better at recording video than the older phone, but the LED flash creates as many problems as it solves. It's often too bright and changes the colors. In a test picture our walnut-finished floors looked like they were cherry.
The 5610 uses the fifth edition of Nokia's Series 40 software platform. The 5300 used the third edition of Series 40, and the general layout and operating structure is largely the same between the two phones. But Nokia has made some substantial improvements in appearance and features with the latest revision.
The music player is also programmed to update the music library automatically when the USB cable is disconnected, which eliminates another chore that needed to be done manually with the older software. The fast forward and reverse is now much faster (the old system was painfully slow) and the music player looks a million times better. On the downside, the shuffle and repeat options are too buried in the player's options menu to be accessed easily.
Elsewhere with the software, there's also a nice new minimize option for displaying T-Mobile's myFaves on the main screen and new productivity features like a world clock, loan calculator and currency converter. Nokia's organizer and contacts program are more robust than most phones in this class, allowing up to ten numbers across four different categories for each contact, and can be synchronized to the PC using Nokia's exceptional (and free) PC Suite software. The 5610 has POP3 email support, but only if you're using AOL or Yahoo and are subscribing to T-Mobile's data plan. Like the keypad that may not be all that great for texting, if you need to get your email on your phone there are many better choices.
For non-musical entertainment, phones sold through T-Mobile also come with the full version of Guitar Hero III mobile, in addition to demo versions of AMF Bowling, Dance Dance Revolution, Surviving Hollywood and Diner Dash 2.
But this is a music phone, and if it doesn't deliver here nothing else matters. There is a lot to like compared to the 5300. Tops on my list, and my only real pet peeve with the 5300, is that the music player can now see MP3 files inside of folders. On the old phone you had to copy the songs from the folders on your computer into the Music folder on the phone. Now you can drag over whole folders and the music player program will recognize and sort by artists, albums and genres as long as the information is included on the MP3 tag - just like every other MP3 player made in the last five years. Sound quality through the included headphones is very good, with warm and balanced tone in the default equalizer setting and enough volume punch to hear over a lawnmower.
There are problems, however. Two stand out as badly missed opportunities. I think it's a shame that the 5610 doesn't support Audible audio book file format. That's such a natural and obvious fit with how this phone is likely to be used, I don't know how Nokia overlooked it. Nokia also deserves a knock for limiting the Micro SD memory to 4GB. If they, or the phone companies, don't want to ship it with a high-capacity memory card that's understandable, but there is no reason for limiting it to such a small amount. If you want to be taken seriously as a MP3 player today, the ability to install 8GB of memory is the minimum.
Hopefully both of those problems could be fixed with a firmware update. The last problem, however, has no hope of being corrected until Nokia comes out with whatever will follow the 5610, and I'm not betting it will happen then. Or ever. I'm speaking, of course, of Nokia's insane and infuriating use of their proprietary (not because it's patented - no one else wants it) 2.5mm jack for the headset.
As bad as it's been with older phones, where you needed a sound-butchering adapter to use standard 3.5mm headsets or headphones, Nokia has come up with an even worse implementation for the 5610. The included hands-free headset is a two-piece affair. The headset (again made with Nokia's weird practice of giving one earphone twice as much wire as the other) actually has a 3.5mm male jack that ends a couple of inches below your chin. This then plugs into a clip at the top of a second cord. The clip contains the microphone and an action button to answer/end calls and skip to the next track if you're in the music player. This cord has the 2.5mm male jack that actually connects to the phone.
Despite having very good sound quality and microphone performance, the execution of this headset is so unforgivably awful that I knocked a full star from the overall rating. How many ways did they get this wrong? Where do you want to start. If you use a third-party headphones with a normal wire length, the wires from that are going to plug into the clip (which, remember, has the mic for the headset) somewhere south of your waist. That switch on the adapter is the definition of hare trigger. Even a slight brush will trip it, which is a real problem when you're using the 5610 and you're jogging, bicycling, working in the yard, or doing anything else that involves movement.
Just going back to the 5300 headset would be a massive improvement, but I can't see any excuse for having a 2.5mm jack on this phone at all. The new 5130 XpressMusic candy bar phone is almost 50% thinner than the 5610, yet they managed to fit a 3.5mm jack. If necessary, they could have made the 5610 a couple millimeters thicker to fit a standard jack and no one would have noticed or cared. Instead they took a bad design and made it a lot worse.
It's things like that, repeated in generation after generation of phones, which makes me wonder how serious Nokia is about building a really great mid-tier MP3 phone? The improvements in the software platform from the 5300 make these faults stand out even more. How can you market a phone to music enthusiasts and create these problems if they want to use a set of aftermarket headphones? This is a phone so it would be very convenient to use as your primary MP3 player, but you can't install more than 4GB of memory. Listening to audio books would be a great way to pass time in a long commute or workout, but without support for the Audible format there's no way to save your place when you leave the music player program.
The 5610 is a good phone, and if I can get the problem with the headset button worked out I'm sure I'll like using it for the next two years. But I'm also going to think about what could and should have been. Maybe next time, either from Nokia or someone else.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 50 w/contrac Recommended for: Stylish Trendsetters - Hip and Trendy
Epinions.com periodically updates pricing and product information from third-party sources, so some information may be slightly out-of-date. You should confirm all information before relying on it.
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