Review: Nokia’s XpressMusic 5800 – expressly what the touch-screen doctor ordered?
Nokia’s first true touch screen phone has finally arrived, and it’s called the XpressMusic 5800.
With Nokia eschewing touch screen interfaces for so long, and having seen the success of the iPhone’s interface and multi-touch controls, a touch screen response from the world’s largest manufacturer of mobile phones has been a long time coming.
But finally, with the 5800, known as the “Tube” phone and even briefly seen in the Batman Dark Knight movie, a fantastic touch screen phone for Nokia lovers has arrived.
In short, if you love the Nokia interface and wish it could be just touch, your wishes have been granted, with a range of extra tweaks installed to make fingertip control as reliable and user friendly as possible.
As with the HTC Touch HD and the HTC Dream gPhone, there’s no multi-touch on the 5800, but aside from the inability to pinch and swipe both photos and web pages, the feature isn’t missed or necessary.
Sure it’s nice to multi-touch, and I hope Nokia introduces it in future models, especially now that Palm has seemingly broken the Apple patent-protected multi-touch barrier with the imminent launch of the multi-touch rich Palm Pre, but the phone operates perfectly well without it, preserving an added element of one-handed operation that multi-touch phones can’t offer.
With three keyboard layouts and a surprisingly good handwriting recognition capability, as well as having keyboard keys that pop up above the key as per the iPhone (and unlike HTC’s Touch HD software which only makes the key glow a bit under your finger, which is frankly a bit useless), the 5800’s multiple input systems are an example to all of how it should be done.
The phone can be controlled by your fingertip, fingernail, internal stylus or even a “plectrum” that can be attached to the phone’s metal “lanyard” loop, has nice big icons, fingertip sized controls for all the major included apps, smooth scrolling, and a range of other interface niceties.
Equipped with a 3.2 megapixel Carl Zeiss camera, it also records video, has a built-in GPS and mapping software (although you must pay to activate turn-by-turn directions), SMS, MMS, email, Real Player for audio and video streaming, an accelerometer controlled driving game, the ability to take microSD memory cards and plenty of other iPhone matching and/or beating features.
While not as slim as the iPhone, it’s a very iPhone-esque device yet with a uniquely Nokia interface attached, and whether you’re a Nokia fan or not, it’s a very easy phone to use, with plenty of genuinely useful features while also being a great music and video player.
The 5800 is also sold in Australia with Nokia’s “Comes with Music” offering, letting you download as much as you like from a online song collection feature all the major labels and independents, currently at 4+ million songs (and growing to 10 million), over a year long (or 18 month) period.
After that year or 18 months is over, you get to keep all the songs you’ve downloaded, unlike the Apple iTunes store where you must pay US 99c or AUD $1.69 per track.
This fantastic offer will no doubt be enormously popular with teens or anyone who likes music and needs a new phone.
Indeed, the only real ointment in the 5800’s eye comes from its own as-yet unavailable successor and competitor, the Nokia N97.
This will effectively offer all of the 5800’s features, while including a physical, horizontally sliding out keyboard, and a 5 megapixel camera on the back, and presumably coming with a “Comes with Music” offer as well.
But the N97 is still at least 3 months away, while the 5800 officially goes on sale from March 20 in Australia, and is already being heavily promoted with the “Comes with Music” service by Virgin Mobile on bus ads and elsewhere.
Although Nokia must deliver a multi-touch phone in the future, the 5800 and N97 are excellent responses to the existing iPhone threats.
We’re all yet to see just how good the new iPhone 3.0 OS and subsequent 2009 iPhone OS handset will be, but they’ll simply be great examples for Nokia and others to follow. With the 5800 and N97, Nokia is proving it still has plenty of fight left in the tank and isn’t the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer for nothing!
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