Well featured solid phone, Nokia fans will no doubt like
Written: Aug 11 '09 (Updated Aug 12 '09)
Product Rating:
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Pros: Lots of features, beautiful screen, built in speakers, battery life, good rf, multiple input methods
Cons: Touchscreen a little finicky, s60 not as user friendly, creaks a bit/plasticky, attracts dust/fingerprints easy
The Bottom Line: If you like Nokia and are on the fence about getting this phone, go get it! It's not perfect, but good and has lots of useful features.
alanp's Full Review: Nokia XpressMusic 5800 Smartphone
Why did I get this phone? Well mainly because I didn't like my clamshell Nokia 6650. While the 6650 was my 1st Nokia with the Symbian (S60) operating system, and I liked that aspect of it, I hated the clamshell form factor. Plus, I wanted wi-fi. Those were my 2 motivating factors. The touch screen intrigued me, but wasn't a must have, although I did kind of miss the touch screen on my previous Palm Centro. This phone looked like it had everything I wanted so I gave it a shot. So here is a breakdown of what it packs:
- 640x360 touch screen display (resistive) with 16M colors - S60 v5 operating sytem (touch screen version of the S60) - 3.2MP camera and another secondary camera on the face for video calling - 1320mAh battery, that's a pretty good size - GSM 800/900/1800/1900 and UMTS 800/1900 (North America version), Bluetooth, 802.11b/g - built in stereo speakers - 3.5mm headphone jack - expandable microSD memory slot - Comes with 8GB microSD card, headphones with wired remote, usb data cable - Also comes with a stylus and "guitar pick" type input devices
Before I get into the meat of the review, I have to make this absolutely clear: DO NOT compare this phone to the iPhone/iPod Touch. You will be disappointed with the 5800 if you do. I'm a very techie/gadget kind of guy so typically I don't need the fancy frills of something as user friendly and polished as the iPhone, but even so, these two phones are in separate leagues in terms of user interface and ease of use, and yes, I do wish the 5800 behaved a bit more like the iPhone in some respects. When I first got my iPod Touch, there was a definite "WOW" factor to it. With this phone, there wasn't that "WOW" factor, but the 5800 did keep me busy playing with it for hours longer initially than the iPod Touch; and features-wise, this phone without a doubt comes out on top, especially for gadget people like myself.
Build Quality My first impresson was that this is a very light phone. The reason for that is that it's all plastic. The benfit to this is that it keeps the weight down and feels better in a pocket, but it also means you want to me a bit more careful with it. Also, there is definitely some creaking when you press down on the frame of the touch screen. Needless to say, it didn't give me a very great first impression. But as I used it more, it really does feel like a pretty solid phone in your hand. The various plastic doors that can be opened for the microSD slot, usb port, SIM card, etc... are pretty flimsy and hard to open, but at least you won't have to open them on a daily basis. The battery cover is pretty hard to open and is flimsy as well, be careful when you open it. The "guitar pick" thingamabobber touch entry device... forget about it, I'm not even going to take it out of its plastic wrap. Last thing, the stylus, I actually think it's not bad and it stays in its storage slot very tightly. It is much better than the Palm Centro stylus. I'm probably going to be using it a little more than I orignally thought I would.
Phone / RF / Call Quality Definitely Nokia in this department. I've only called a few people since I got the phone, but absolutely no complaints. Gets all the bars in all the right places. Paired easily with my old bluetooth headset and everything sounds great! I'm in the San Francisco area and I constantly get 3.5G reception almost everywhere I go. One thing to definitely note, and you've probably seen this in other reviews too, but the built in speakers of this phone are freakishly good for their size. I just had to reiterate that. Ok, the #1 biggest gripe about the phone, and maybe about the entire device, when you bring up the onscreen dialer number keys, THEY DO NOT HAVE THE CORRESPONDING LETTERS DISPLAYED. For example, the number 2, usually has 3 letters, a, b and c, on the keys in case you need to enter a number like 1-800-MYPHONE. The letters don't exist on the dialer. PLEASE FIX THIS NOKIA! Good news is, for text entry purposes, the letters do show up, just not when you dial a phone number.
Display / Touch Screen 640x360, very high resolution for a screen this size. Graphics, menus, etc... all come out beautifully. It's a little hard to see in the sun, but at max brightness, it is very bright and gets the job done. The touch screen is hit or miss though, unless you use the stylus. It's not as forgiving as the capcitive type screens since you have to press down harder for resistive technology. And by pressing down harder, your finger makes more surface area contact which minimizes the accuracy. It's far from unusable, but you may find yourself accidentally touching stuff you didn't plan on touching (tee hee hee) or conversely, if you're too careful about it, the screen might not register your touch. Overall though, for a resistive screen, it works quite well, it's sensitive enough, you just have to practice your aim! I find myself using my pinky fingernail a lot, and my hands are definitely not large. If you don't mind taking out the stylus once in a while, I'd actually highly recommend it. If you plan on using the phone for a long persiod of time, the stylus really comes in handy and makes touching a lot more "mistake-less." It's a bit on the short side, but it's a solid stylus. Give it a try, you just might like it! On another note, there is a very handy spring loaded slide switch on the right side of the phone to lock and unlock the screen, and i mean it's VERY handy. And on top of that, there is a proximity sensor on the top part of the screen so if you're on a call and bring the phone close to your face, it automatically turns off the screen. Very cool. The built in accelerometer works ok, but it only works for 2 of the 4 possible directions so you can only rotate it counterclock wise to get into landscape mode and vice versa back to portrait. Not a big deal I supppose, but I don't know why they didn't just allow you to rotate it either way, doesn't seem like it would be hard to do. Anyway, like I said, it just works ok, mainly because it can be a bit overly sensitive to rotations. It changes the display mode sometimes when you don't want it to. Changing between portrait to landscape, for the most part is pretty quick, but it can get dragged out to several seconds depending on what type of app you are running at the time. But most of the time, within 1-2 seconds, it rotates. And finally, I have to say, this thing, being touch screen and all, gets fingerprints like crazy. Keep your wipe cloth or t-shirt handy as you'll be cleaing off the screen a lot. Even the back battery cover attracts fingerprints.
Touch Interface I thought this would take more getting used to since I've had my iPod Touch for over a year now, but honestly, I got it down pretty quick. I think it has to do a lot with the fact I've used the S60 interface before and I have to say, I so much prefer S60 with a touch screen than with the navigational D-pad. Is it perfect? Far from it, but it works quite well. You can drag icons to rearrange them in the menu, Nokia (Ovi) maps is a bit simpler to use now, scrolling through a web page is nice too. The biggest quirk about the touch screen is that you still have to use the scroll bar on the right side of the screen to scroll through a menu in most cases. If you're iPhone savvy, you'd normally just drag the entire screen one way of another to scroll right? So it might take some getting used to. But, if you use a computer often, and you drag a scroll bar often, you'll feel right at home so it's not a big deal. Another thing, most menu items require a double touch to select, once to highlight the menu item, and once to actually select it. I thought this would annoy me a lot because some menu items (like the main S60 menu) don't require this double touch. However it really doesn't matter that much, you get used to it very quick. Bottom line, S60 isn't the most user friendly, though this touch version of it makes it a a tiny bit more noob friendly.
Connectivity Bluetooth as alluded to before works great. Wi-Fi, well, when connected, it works great, but this also has some quirks. First things first, you can save various SSID names and their corresponding security settings, no problem. Also, the phone asks you how you want to connect to the internet when you, say, open up the web browser.. also no problem, just select WLAN. BUT, there the annoying part, after you select WLAN, it does not automatically go through your saved list of SSIDs and trys to connect to it, you have to pick one manually. Furthermore, if you want to connect to and SSID that is not broadcasting, you have to manually enter the name of it each time! Luckily though, you don't have to reenter the security information if you already have it saved in your list of SSIDs. Now, there might be a way to avoid this is you turn on "WiFi scanning", but I don't want my phone to be scanning for hotspots all the time and waste battery life so I purposely leave it off. EDIT: I found a setting where you can tell the phone to see saved but non-broadcasting (hidden) SSIDs. This makes it much easier, hooray! I'm too cheap to get a data plan with my service provider so I haven't tried out the data connectivity through HSDPA, but I'd imagine it be to fine at a 3.6Mbps. Sorry, it doesn't have the faster 7.2Mbps. Connecting to your computer via Bluetooth is great for transferring small files, but if you're transferring lots of data, like mp3s, the usb cable is pretty speedy and is preferred; and it's wonderful that they included one in the box. When you connect to your computer via usb, the phone will ask you how you want it to be seen on the computer. I don't remember all the usb connection options offhand, but one of them was to be seen as a "Mass Storage Device" i.e. a disk drive. Works for me! Oh, I think another option was to connect as a modem so you can hop online with your laptop, tethering.
Music and Videos The music player is pretty intuitive and sounds really good. I will still use my iPods as my primary source for music so I don't have too much to say about this area, but I'll be loading some songs on here to listen to just in case I don't have my iPod with me. The 3.5mm jack lets you use whatever headphone you want. Also, the inline remote/headphone that came with the phone is detatchable beyond the remote portion so you can still plug in your headphones into the remote and retain the remote capabilities. Or you can just plus your headphones directly into the phone, your choice. The FM radio is pretty standard too, but as usual, you'll need to use it with headphones as the headphone wire acts as the FM antenna. You can save and name presets galore, I think upwards of 20 or more. I haven't downloaded any video to the phone yet, but it came with some sample videos. I watched the Batman Dark Knight trailer on it and it was pretty amazing. Quality is just as good as my iPod touch, and even a bit crisper due to the higher resolution. Now if they could only defy physics and squeeze a 4" screen into the same form factor! :)
Web browsing The built in web brower isn't bad. When in full screen mode, it's actually quite nice since it can use the entire 640x360, but the drawback of full screen is that you lose the loading progress bar so you have no idea when the page is done loading. Web pages are a little slow to load, especially the more complicated ones. And while it's loading a page, it's pretty unresponsive to any touch commands. But despite that, it renders most pages I've thrown at it pretty well. It even has built in flash capabilities so in this sense it's a bit superior to the iPhone (but that's about it). I've only had it crash once on me so far when I attempted to open a youtube video that was pretty big. I anticipate more crashes in the future though. I tried out Opera Mini on it as well. The touch screen scrolling for Opera works well too and it's definitely snappier than the built in web browser. Bottom line, don't get your hopes up for an iPhone-esque browsing experience. Without gestures, zooming in and out can be a little cumbersome, though not horrible. Luckily, there is more screen real estate on this phone compared to the iPhone.
Text input There are 4 methods: 1) Onscreen number pad text entry with T9. This is JUST like using a regular 0-9 number pad to enter text. No different from a non-touch screen Nokia. It's actually a little better because you can scroll through the symbol list faster 2) Full qwerty. This is what I'll probably use the most and it only works in landscape mode. Like I said before, I don't have large fingers, but I found myself making mistakes more often than I'd like, probably again due to the fact it's resistive and I have to press down a tad harder. But making mistakes isn't the biggest gripe, it's not automatically spell checking the mistakes. With T9 predictive text input capabilities, you'd think Nokia would be able to do quick spell check on typos. Oh well, can't win them all 3) Mini qwerty, just like the full qwerty but about 1/4 the size, although available in both portrait and landscape mode. Very hard to use w/o the stylus 4) Handwriting recognition. This was a surprise to me. While handwriting recognition on a PDA is SO '90s, I'm actually very glad they included this option. It works very well! You just need to deal with busting out the stylus to use it. The phone can even be trained to recognize your own type of handwriting. To be honest, I like how it works better than Palm's. Basically, when you select this option, a little writing area box pops up. What's cool is, when you start writing, what you write actually shows up on the screen. Once the phone recognizes the letter you wrote, the strokes that showed up on the screen slowly fade away as you start writing the next letter. Also, the writing area is big enough to write out entire shorter words so you don't have to write it one letter at a time like on a Palm. Very well done IMO and not completely useless as I originally thought it might be.
Camera I really hate it when people say, "The camera on the <insert phone name> really sucks." I personally think, if you don't have at least a decent point and shoot, the camera sucks. Unless you really have some high end, and I'm talking about really high end, phone, the picture is going to "suck." For what I do, just take random candid pictures of friends and stuff with a cell phone, it works just fine. Colors, espeically indoor aren't great, the flash washes out the picture, but SO WHAT? It's a camera phone. As long as I can make out people's faces and get a general idea of where the picture was taken, I'm happy. Plus, this phone has a few extra bells and whistles for a camera phone like autofocus, red eye reduction, self timer, etc... I'm a little disappointed they didn't allow true 16:9 widescreen still image or videos, but I'll live. I've seen better cameras on a phone, but this one is ok.
Battery Life It's pretty good. For the 1st two days I had this phone, I was doing all sorts of stuff to it like wi-fi browsing, updating firmware, turning it on and off, syncing, changing settings left and right, transferring files over bluetooth, and made at least 1 hour worth of calls. And the whole time, I was using 3.5G which we all know uses more battery. I lasted just about 2 whole days, just shy of 48 hours, before I needed to charge. It's not quite as good as my old 6650 (which had a 1500mAh battery!) but it's more than sufficient. For my type of regular use, I'd anticipate 3-4 days between charges, probably even more if I force the phone into 2G mode.
Miscellaneous comments - Comes with a video out cable to hook up to a TV. It's a composite cable though... what did you expect, HDMI? :)
- There is no plastic door for the headphone jack or the charger port. I'm afraid dust will collect in them. There is a door for all the other ports, why not these?
- I haven't tried, but you can use Bluetooth stereo headsets as well as stream music via Bluetooth to compatible receivers.
- In the upper right corner of the screen, right under the secondary camera is a dedicated touch button which brings up a preset shortcut menu for images, videos, music, and the web. Kind of handy.
- The screen will vibrate when you touch it, simulating real button presses. I found this to be very annoying and disabled it immediately.
- When you have a missed call or new message, the middle menu button toward the bottom of the phone pulses. It looks cool and is very functional. EDIT: I noticed a bug where sometimes even after you check your messages or missed calls, this light still pulses until you unlock and lock the screen again. I'm using firmware 21.2.025
Conclusion Overall, I like this phone. It has its shortcomings, but it has more pros than cons. I'll be honest, if the iPhone was a little smaller and you weren't forced to add a data contract and a bit cheaper (without a service contract), I probably would have gone with that instead. However, I've always been a Nokia fan, ever since 1996, and not just because I'm used to them, but I still feel the put out decent products. They definitely have a bit of catching up to do with the advent of the iPhone and similar devices, but I feel the 5800 was a step in the right direction. Other phones in the same class don't seem be as "whole package" as this phone just by comparing specs and espeically comparing the price. This is the 4th phone I've owned in the past year, I think I finally found one I'll stick with for a while.
Should you get this phone? If you are on the tech geek side, have used and enjoyed Symbian S60, and like a phone that does a lot (though not necessarily does everything superbly) then I would definitely check this phone out. It has pretty much all you can ask for in a small package. But if you're looking for an iPhone replacement for a cheaper price, don't bother.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 299.99 Recommended for: Stylish Trendsetters - Hip and Trendy
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