The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is, despite its youth-orientated name, Nokia’s answer to the iPhone. Its touch screen, downloadable applications and weighty set of business uses puts it in direct competition – but does it stand up to the comparison?
The short answer is ‘yes’. Nokia have waited a long time before bringing out a decent touch screen phone, despite them being en vogue with mobile phone buyers for some time.
And clearly, the manufacturer has been careful to produce a handset of substance.
• Size: 52 x 111 x 15.5 mm
• Weight: 109g
• LCD screen size 640 x 360
• Talk time: between five and 10 hours
• Battery standby: up to 400 hours
• Memory: 81MB internal memory, supports up to 16GB micro SD
We liked:
Nokia’s 5800 XpressMusic is a great phone. The fact that many commentators are calling it the first 'real competitor' to the iPhone is complement enough, but it is not a straight clone of Apple’s offering.
It’s smaller than other handsets, but manages to squeeze in an impressively large screen (at 3.2 inches) that makes viewing documents, photos, video and the internet easy-peasy.
The 5800’s layout is intuitive and copes well with the numerous tools that it offers the user. The camera is good, though the pictures are fairly low quality and video capture is impressive even when you play films back on the handset itself.
There’s a voice recorder which allows you to witter on for a full hour, a radio and mp3 player. You can access a range of (mainly American) podcasts and buy your favourite tunes from Nokia’s own music store.
For business people on the move there’s the opportunity to download versions of Adobe Reader and Quickoffice, and the phone syncs seamlessly with Outlook, so you can check and send emails too.
Meanwhile, for texting, there’s the option of a standard or QWERTY keyboards, which appear on the touch screen at your request. The buttons are chunky and you can type a message quickly and simply.
You can also use a stylus (supplied with spare), if you’re into that sort of thing.
The 5800 offers web-surfing to compete with the iPhone with 3G, HSDPA and wi-fi connectivity. It’s quick enough to be useful too, although panning around a webpage can be slow and jittery.
It all sits on the Symbian operating system S60, fifth edition, which like the iPhone before it allows developers to build their own apps for customers to download. This hasn’t taken off like it did with the iPhone, but there’s plenty of time yet.
But we didn't like:
This phone is a strong contender to the iPhone's thrown, but realistically it’s not quite as good. Close, but perhaps not close enough. It doesn’t quite match the sheer usability of its rival.
The 5800 fails to capitalise on the Symbian S60’s full potential, with its capability for tracking emails and uploading to social networking websites; which is a shame. That said it is cheaper than the iPhone and future versions could correct these tiny problems.
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