My New Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

After more than 16 months of abuses, surfing, shooting photos, tracking, navigating, gaming, headbanging (to my metal music collections), plus a couple of careless drops, I finally let go of my trusty N95 8Gb to get the Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic.

Many will feel that why I would downgrade my phone to a mid-range music phone. Well, I see the only downgrade being the camera, which is only 3.2MP as compared to 5MP on the previous phone. Well, not a very big loss to me since the new phone can take decent shots, and most of the N95 features are still found in this phone.

In fact, I wasn't really want a touchscreen phone initially, given the experience I had with iPhone some time back. However, I had done many visits to sites to read up on the review for this phone, being the first Symbian 5th Edition device in the market. The review on the phone had been mostly positive, esp on the touchscreen. N97 and Omnia HD looked more powerful, but also will come with a heftier price tag. So since I have no intention to burn a hole in my wallet just to get a phone, and my N95 looked so abused, I decided to just go to the streets to casually check out the price, just for the fun of it.

My colleagues and me walked around the estate, asking the shops for the price. At the same time I casually asked for my N95's trade in price. It was until we asked this shop about the phone. The price quoted was not the lowest but also not the highest. But what triggered me to seriously consider buying the phone was when the boss gave me a very attractive trade in price for old phone. After some calculation, I would only need to pay less than 200 to get the new phone. Good deal right?

So after some considerations, I finally decided to trade in the old phone while it still hold some good value.

So I got myself a brand new 5800 Symbian 5th Edition phone export set without burning a hole in my wallet. What's an export set you might ask? It is a non locally warranted set which the phone is brought in from another country, which in my phone's case, from Malaysia. What's wrong with the local set? In 5800 case, the local set will be bundled with a service called Comes with Music, which jack up the price of the phone. This ends up a mid-range phone at high-end price. On top of that, the service provides songs in WMA format with Digital Rights Management, meaning you can only play the music on the device and one PC. So I don't need this service and certainly don't need the local warranty (the local service centre is practically useless), so export set is the logical choice. Anyway the shop provided its own 1 year warranty.

Personal review on this phone will come soon. Stay tuned.