Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
Photo by nechbi, used under CC licence
The Nokia 5800: Nokia’s answer to the iPhone. If the question is “how do we make money out of touchscreen, quickly?”, that is.
The phone seems like they’ve taken the operating system and placed a touchscreen on top of it. The look and feel is very similar to those Nokias that aren’t touchscreen, with a menu driven system and screens that scroll down. If you’re used to the Nokia way of doing things, you’ll be feeling very much at home here.
There’s many small niggles with the operating system, and it doesn’t seem as polished as a specifically designed touch operating system such as the iPhone OS. But the on-screen keyboard is the biggest let down: It’s very ill thought out, resulting in tiny targets for your fingers which caused me to keep missing the key I wanted, and the screen is forced into landscape mode. Having to turn my phone sideways to write a text message is a big hassle for someone for me, as I prefer to use my phone in portrait mode.
But really, these are all minor problems when it comes to the biggest downfall: the hardware itself. It seems like the operating system is constantly playing catchup with the phone; there’s a noticeable wait when you do things like go to read text messages, and surfing the web is almost impossible. Maybe it was a bad connection, but I found myself waiting for ages to load up even the Google homepage.
I also wasn’t very keen on the touchscreen. I have boyish short nails and whenever I use a touchscreen I use the front of my finger. However, for this phone I had to use the tip of my nail, as using something as fat as my finger meant either the wrong button was pressed or nothing was pressed at all.
As with most other Nokia phones, the camera is also of questionable quality. The resolution isn’t very high at all which results in relatively small photographs, and the image looks very grainy. It’s not bad as a point and shoot camera, but I wouldn’t use it as my main camera.
The Nokia 5800 tries hard, but it’s let down mostly by the hardware. There are better products out there if you’re after a touchscreen music player (namely the iPod touch), and there are much better cameraphones out there. The price might make this a tempting phone, but personally I wouldn’t go for it.