Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

My first impressions of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic – impressive, easy to use, a phone for the youth and more importantly Nokia are finally putting up a fight in the modern mobile market.

The 5800 XpressMusic is a touchscreen, multimedia orientated phone which includes most of the latest features you would expect from a new mobile phone.

The handset is running the latest Symbian OS, S60 5th edition which means it features all the latest features from Nokia. Nokia have stuck to Symbian and have really created a platform that everyone has become accustomed to.

The 5800’s touch screen works really well and with a smart layout of all the icons it makes the phone very easy to navigate. One thing we did struggle with was that the phone looks like it really wants to have a slide out QWERTY keypad which left us playing around for hours trying to see if it did have one, sadly it didn’t.

The 5800 XpressMusic really is designed for entertainment and multimedia. It is armed with a 3.2 megapixel camera nicely coupled with a flash for those low light situations. It also sports a nice easy to use media player which allows you to play your favourite tracks via the stereo speakers on the phone or you could plug in your favourite headphones via the standard-sized stereo jack.

On the messaging front you can both SMS and email from the phone which seems to be a very standard feature these days. The on screen QWERTY keyboard is easy to get used to. A nifty little feature was the ability for you to whip out the stylus and write your characters manually (old school writing way), it did take a bit of getting used to because most of use have not held a pen in ages!

The GPS is pretty good but unfortunately it comes at a premium as with all Nokia GPS capable phones which is a pitty because it is such a nice feature to have especially when you have free unlimited access to it.

The worst but coolest feature of the phone is the accelerometer which gives the phone information about the movement of the phone. This allows you to turn the phone over to silence an annoying call or do the same to snooze your alarm (the reason I was late for work a few times).