REVIEW
NOKIA 5800 XpressMusic (around 300 euros as of october 2009)
I have a long history of owning Nokia phones. Ever since the legendary Nokia 2110i I have always owned a phone by Nokia. Perhaps not because they were better than others, because they always aren’t (though back then they were), but mainly because I’ve gotten used to the UI that seems to follow the same main rules throughout the years.
UNBOXING
My latest phone (since about one week back) is the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic touch screen phone.
The package included one built-in writing stylus, one writing plectrum (shaped like a guitar plectrum, although I wouldn’t use it to play guitar), a pair of in-ear headphones, a hands free adapter with a normal 3,5mm headphone output, a (short) USB cable, one pre-installed 8GB MicroSD card and of course a battery charger.
TOUCHY FEELY
The phone itself fits rather nicely in the hand. The front is wider than the back, so the unit feels smaller than its 3,2″ (640×360) screen would suggest. The weight, 108 grams, is very well what you would expect from a phone of that size. It doesn’t feel overly light nor exceedingly heavy.
My thumb reaches over the entire screen while holding the phone in one hand. This makes one-handed use easier.
The screen is clear and sharp, though of course a bit hard to see in bright sunlight. Almost all menu screens adapt to the phone’s orientation depending of how you hold the phone. Built in sensors recognize the orientation the phone is held in and turns the screen accordingly.
Smudgy fingerprints don’t seem to affect the image quality too much.
Input method is per software keyboard (touch screen). There are three different choices: Numeric keys (phone keys), a smaller qwerty (when the phone is held upright and a bigger qwerty when the phone is held at landscape orientation. The bigger qwerty is my preferred method since I have rather clumsy bass player fingers and I also have some sort of disorder that makes my hands a bit fumbly sometimes. Writing on the bigger full screen qwerty goes pretty swiftly and is a BIG improvement over my previous Nokia 5500 phone.
One other thing I’ve noticed is the software includes nothing that makes left handed use more difficult than right handed use. I myself write and draw with my left hand (but I do almost everything else right handed).
Some machines and gadgets are clearly designed for right handed people and some of their functions feel very backward for a lefty person. Nothing of that sort here.
PERFORMANCE
The 5800 seems to be working as expected. No big surprises there. I have even experimentally transferred a few DVDs (with video compression) onto the phone. It accepts MPEG4 movies, which are considerably smaller in size than the less compressed DVDs. Video quality is fair, given the very small picture size. My home TV is WAY bigger than the 5800′s tiny screen, so I might be a bit spoilt in this sense.
The movie screen is 16:9. A movie of wider format may be viewed in letterbox or zoomed fullscreen with sides cropped. Likewise, 4:3 movies may be viewed in pillarbox format or zoomed and cropped at top&bottom. Due to the puny size of the screen, movies are better watched in zoomed mode (although I dislike any kind of cropping of movies).
Audio output is either by headphones (there’s a standard 3,5mm jack on the top of the unit) or by built-in stereo speakers. Frequency response of the speakers is of course pretty limited, but they are plenty loud and surprisingly clear with not too much audible distortion.
CONNECTIVITY
Since I recently switched over to Mac (from being a 15+ years Windows man), I was a bit worried about how I would connect my phone to my Mac. In fact, I was so worried, I even considered the iPhone for a while, but dropped it because it requires iTunes, a program I loathe even more than I loathe the dreaded Nokia PC Suite.
PC Suite is a bloating piece of turd that I absolutely HATE. Slow and awful. But it’s for PCs only. That’s why I was happy to consider a Nokia phone now that I’ve got a Mac. I wouldn’t have to use the stinking PC Suite anymore. But I still had to connect the phone to my Mac somehow. How?
The answer came even closer than expected. It works directly under my Mac, via Bluetooth or USB (as a USB mass storage device). And by downloading a small plugin for iSync, it even syncs it’s calendar and contacts with Mac’s iCal and Address Book over Bluetooth. With only one click. No bulky and crappy programs needed for that.
Nokia has released a Mac app called something like Multimedia Transfer. It should make transferring music and videos to the phone easier. I tried it a couple of times but decided to drop it into the bin. It wasn’t that nice at all. Instead, I use HandBrake to transcode videos and the phone’s USB mass storage mode to copy them onto the phone.
The phone also has built-in WiFi for internet connections, as well as 3G/UMTS packet data. It can be configured to prefer WiFi over packet data to save traffic costs whenever possible.
All in all I’m even better off now that there aren’t any Nokia programs I have to install. They are all big pieces of sh*t and I’m very glad my Mac handles my phone so well without the need for third party (Nokia) software.
Only thing I still need my PC laptop and PC Suite for is to make backups of the phone’s settings and applications. Let’s hope there will be a Mac app for that too sometime. And then NOT by Nokia, but rather by some third party manufacturer. Nokia should stay away from making computer software. They’re good at phones, but they suck balls at computer software.
The phone’s Internet connection and large screen allows for some browsing of lighter pages, such as Wikipedia (a VERY useful source of information). Heavier pages with lots of media and frames are better left alone. Sites with dedicated versions for mobile devices are still preferred because of the limited resolution of the phone’s screen. Larger pages can be scrolled around by just sliding with the finger, but that gets tiresome in the long run.
GPS
The phone has a built in a-GPS receiver and Nokia Maps navigation. The GPS is my favorite thing about this phone. Nokia Maps has preloaded maps, so you won’t have to load new maps every time you move to another location. You can of course use Google Maps as well, but thos require continuous (and expensive) GPRS packet data traffic for downloading.
Time for first GPS fix when starting the receiver is sometimes very long, but using the a-GPS function enables the phone to connect via the GSM network and to get assistance in positioning. This makes satellite fix faster.
LOOKY LOOKY
I learned how to take screenshots just a couple of days ago. So here we go:
1. Home Screen (the “desktop”).
I’ve downloaded some nice themes I like to use and personalised them by making my own wallpapers. The one on the left is pretty obvious to some of you readers; this phone is, because of its internet capabilities, an enormous information bank (and those are rather big friendly letters, aren’t they?). The one on the right is my daughter holding a glowing toy ball.
2. The first menu screen with two different themes.
The first menu screen is what appears when you push the HW menu button while on your home screen (desktop). You can also choose to view the menus in list view or icon view. Icon view depicted here. The menu folders can be moved around and even dropped into other folders (for instance, I could move the ‘Games’ folder into ‘Media’ if I wanted).
The star beside the Applications folder icon means there is a running application inside that folder (this would be the screenshot application I had running at the time).
CONCLUSION
All in all, I feel the phone does the trick for me. I’ve had trouble with the phone not alerting for incoming messages at one time (the messages just appeared into the inbox, but no alert was heard or seen), but that went away with a reboot. Also, the messaging application (for all messages; SMS or email) sometimes seems to lose connection to the memory card and switches to internal memory instead. I don’t know what the casue to this is. Maybe a bug or the card itself. The card seems to work OK though, so perhaps it’s just a bug (with hopefully a fix coming soon).
The touch screen is mostly very good. Finger response could be a bit more sensitive. Sometimes I’ll have to press harder than I’m used to with other touch screens. There is no setting for this, so again we hope for a fix in coming firmware versions. Stylus response leaves nothing more to wish for. That one works well. The touch screen is a much better input method than my old 5500 phone’s crappy keypad.
All applications should be installed on card memory whenever possible. The internal memory is very limited and many installations clog it up pretty fast. Also on the wishlist is better memory handling in future firmwares. Perhaps a virtual memory function to extend the working memory onto the SD card.
I don’t have the phone with many apps running all the time. This is to save memory and battery time.
I haven’t yet had enough experience as of battery time. I’ve been playing around, loading and watching videos so much that it drains the battery in one day. But I would assume it normally lasts for three days or so. That’s average for a phone like this. My former Nokia 5500 lasted for 5 days, but it’s screen is very tiny compared to the 5800. That’s a huge power hog. Also you should remember to keep Bluetooth and WiFi switched off when not in use. WiFi is usually automatically off when not browsing on the internet, but Bluetooth is always on unless you manually switch it off. Hence the Bluetooth button on my front screen; I can quickly switch it on and off.
Finally, the phone is very well worth its 300 euros. It functions nicely and does excactly what it’s supposed to do. Period.
USEFUL APPS
Useful freeware applications for Nokia phones on the S60v5 platform:
-Scratchpad or Xpressnote (apps for making handwritten notes)
-Screensnap (for making screenshots)
-Slick (internet messaging)
-Opera Mini (web browser)
-Converter by Offscreen (convert between lots of different measurements)
-The Musician’s Swiss Knife (metronome/tone generator/BPM counter)
-Chords (displays guitar chords)
-XpressDrums (sequencer for making simple drum patterns)
-Nokia Photo Browser (beautiful browsing of your images)
MORE ON THE WEB
Nokia 5800 on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_5800_XpressMusic
Please feel free to comment, give more links or ask questions and I will update this review accordingly.
-Micci-
Supplement 28-11-2009:
The phone had some problems with the (currently latest) v31 firmware. Sometimes I could not hear the person I was speaking to. They could hear me though, and usually after hanging up and redialling the voice could be heard normally.
Sent the phone in for servicing and they downgraded the firmware to v21. Now it functions as it should do, but I lost some of the improved performance and functionality of v31. There are rumours of an upcoming v4x with some new goodies, so I’ll just have to wait and see.
Supplement 13-01-2010:
Okie dokie. The rumours were correct. Today a FW v40.0.005 was released and I immediately updated my phone. New features include kinetic scrolling of lists and list style menus (flick your finger once and the list keeps on scrolling for a while). There’s also an improved home screen with contacts carousel (also kinetically scrolling) and numerous other small improvements and fixes. It is also slightly more memory efficient.
The new FW finally makes the 5800 unified with Nokia’s other touch screen models, which all sport similar UI:s. 5800 was the only exception, with an older design UI (until now, that is).
Nokia took their time developing this, and I think the bulk of the time was spent correcting bugs. The new UI is simply lifted off their other models, so that couldn’t have taken this long. There were a few annoying bugs in v31 that followed through all versions of 3x. I think they wanted to make sure it wouldn’t happen again.
I will try out this new FW and report back if I find anything worth mentioning.
Bye for now.
Supplement 21-01-2010:
Allrighty then. One week of intensive testing behind and I can tell v40 WORKS. For instance, the GPS positioning infact locks on in a matter of seconds, instead of in a matter of minutes in the previous FW. Battery life has improved as well.
To top it all off, Nokia announced they will now offer Ovi Maps navigation for free. Previously, only positioning and searching on maps has been free, but now even voice guided car and pedestrian navigation is free. I tried it out and it is infact so good, I think I will retire my Mio Moov I have installed in my car. Even the guidance voice is more pleasant than in my Mio.
Nokia’s routes seem better than the ones Mio calculates. I’ve had some serious problems with that. Mio has had me drive on forest tractor paths when there has been a highway available. Even if I had “Unpaved roads” set to “Avoid”. Jesus. One trip from Turku to Skuru took me one extra hour because of this.
Thank you Nokia for free Navigation.
