Personal Review on Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

It's been a while since I've gotten the world's first Symbian S60 5th Edition touchscreen phone from Nokia, and through playing with it for the last couple of days, I am able to write a review based on my personal usage. The phone is reviewed with an export set (shouldn't have any difference from the local one except no local warranty & no Come With Music service) based on the latest firmware (V20) which I managed to upgrade thru some means (don't ask me how, google for it). And I will made comparisions with my old phone, N95 8GB as I do not know the FP2 devices before.

Package Contents
The phone package contains the following items:
- 5800 XpressMusic phone
- battery
- audio headset with earbuds
- plectrum stylus phone strap
- phone stand strap (seriously, who will strap this to their phone? Lol)
- extra stylus
- charger
- rubberised plastic case
- tv out cable
- microUSB cable
If you ask me, I find that Nokia is not stingy with what they put in for this mid range phone. In fact, I feel it didn't lose out to its high end N-series offerings. No complaints on this part.

Build and Hardware
Since this is Nokia's mid-range phone (with top-range platform imo), I don't expect the phone to be made out of premium materials. As most had guessed, the entire external casing is made out of plastics. I gotten myself a red set but upon close inspection, the side casing is made out of translucent red plastics with a opaque red plastic strip around it. The back cover is also of plastics and followed the design of current N series back cover. While it's made entirely out of plastics, there's no sign of creaking and feels very solid and well built. As compared to my N95, there's a good improvement in this department.

The phone do not have much hardware keys, only volume, camera, power, call and menu keys. The menu and call keys are situated below the screen, the volume and camera keys on the right side and power key on the top, alongside with the 3.5mm jack, charging socket and microUSB slot. Personally, I do not fancy the idea of using micro USB as I find mini USB cables are more common than the former. I myself have more than 5 such cables and now I can't use them on this phone. Well that's me though, some probably don't have this gripe as mine.

The call and menu keys are pretty tactile when pressed and I kinda like the feel of them. The volume keys are quite decent to press as well. Only gripe I have with the buttons is the camera button. It is kinda stiff and I need some effort to press the button to focus on the object I wanna take, hence losing the shooting stability as a result. Maybe I need to "devirginise" the button for a longer period haha.

On top of the screen is the secondary camera, proximity & ambient light sensor, the earpiece speaker and XpressMusic shortcut touch button. Most of the components most are quite familiar, the only new features are the proximity sensor and the XpressMusic touch button. The proximity sensor is to sense objects near the phone so that when the user is having a call the proximity sensor will sense the face near the phone and turn off the screen. This is to prevent unnecessary presses on the screen during calls. Nice and practical feature certainly. However, you have to take note not to cover the sensor when you try to install the screen protector as it will cause the phone to blank out the screen when there's a call coming in. The XpressMusic touch button is basically a shortcut bar where you can launch Music Player, Gallery, Share Online service and Nokia Maps. The shortcuts are not customizable so it's pretty limited.

On the left side of the phone holds the covers to the Sim card and memory card slot. The memory card slot accepts microSD and 8Gb card is included in the package. Some regions may have a slightly different package though.

For those who have used a S60 phone before, you should not have any difficulty adapting to the 5th edition as there is not much deviations from the 3rd edition platform. The UI is more or less the same, except some minor changes on the main home screen, I will touch on that later. Since there is little difference in the UI structure, I will only talk on the new features/changes not seen at least in my N95 and will only touch on features I use in my daily life.

Homescreen
First of all, the Home Screen. The layout of the Home Screen is pretty much the same as what you see on 3rd Edition phones, just that now on 5800 XpressMusic, you can determine the type of info bar you want to see.

i) None: You can choose to have just the main screen, where you can enjoy the full view of the wallpaper

ii) Contact Bar: you can place 4 of your favorite contacts on the Home Screen, where each of them will display information like call & message history and you can even have web feed of his/her blog or site to updates from time to time. There is also a way to have facebook status on the contact info like what you see in the screenshot, more information can be found here. Then again, I wished that Nokia can allow more contacts into the contact bar in the next firmware update. 4 Contacts is kinda too little. On top of that, including the calendar appointment overview  when Contact Bar in collapsed mode wouldn't hurt either.

iii) Shortcut Bar: This one is almost similar to the classic Active Standby screen you see in 3rd Edition phones, except it is now made for touch, so the icons are bigger, which results in lesser shortcuts. I could have 6 shortcuts in my N95 but in 5800 it has been reduced to 4. The Search application in V20 enables me to search for items on the web as well as contents in the phone. The appointment is one of my favorite features as I can have a glimpse of my upcoming appointments/meetings, which is very handy.

Through my usage for the past week, I also discovered some cool actions 5th Edition OS had implemented. The Information Bar on the top of the screen can actually invoke shortcuts to the various applications. I made a rough description on the picture to have an idea of how the shortcuts can do.

Contacts
The contact features in 5800 has not changed much from the 3rd Edition phones. You can still key in the same number of details in a contact as per my N95. So I won't touch much on this. The only addition I discovered is that there is now a Call Alert Text, which do not serve much practical purpose. It's just a customizable text where it will be displayed on the home screen when the contact with assigned call alert text calls in or you call him/her. No big impact though

Messaging & Email
Ok, guess this is the most used feature in the phone. Singaporeans loved to text, including me LOL. The messaging mechanism is pretty much the same as in 3rd Edition phone (as the saying goes, "Don't fix when it's not broken"), very user friendly. On my N95, I can use the pencil key to perform the selection of text for copy/paste function. In 5800, there is no such key so how do I do the copy/paste? Simple, I just tap on the beginning (or the end) of the text I want to select, hold on the screen and slide to the desired ending (or beginning). Then I tap on the OPTIONS and select COPY ,go to the desired pasting point, tap OPTIONS again and select PASTE. Voila! It's that easy.

In the message editor, the default is SMS editing mode. so if you add in an email address into the recipient field or attach files, the editor will inform me that the message will be sent as MMS and asked if I want to continue. Pretty intelligent.


I also used the built-in Email application to access my Gmail account. The email application supports both POP and IMAP protocol so you can configure it to access a wide range of email systems. One major gripe I have with the client is the lack of support for HTML format. I can't use formatting on the mail I typed which is kind of frustrating at times, especially when I post entries onto my blog. There's 3rd party email clients out there that supports HTML but I prefer to keep things integrated, so can't complain much LOL.

I also installed Nokia Mail for Exchange to access my office exchange mail on the move. Since I have subscribed to M1's 1Mbps data plan which is almost unlimited, I can afford to set the client to check the email at very short intervals. Note that this will reduce your battery life but since I charge the phone everyday, so no issue for me. The Mail for Exchange worked flawlessly on the phone, I managed to receive my mails almost immediately. The MFE is tightly integrated with the inbuilt message editor so again, no HTML format support.

Multimedia and Camera
The 5800 XpressMusic is marketed as a music-centric phone, so I would expect some good performance from the multimedia front.

Fortunately, the phone lived up to its expectations. The dual speakers is damn loud and clear when playing music with the S60 Music Player. You will get the best effect if you place the phone on the provided music stand where the table gives some body to the overall sound. As I'm not a user of sound enhancement features, I give this feedback based on neutral settings, which means no Bass Boost and Stereo Widening. If you ask me, the LOUDNESS option kinda dull the sound thru the speakers but on the headphones it sounded pretty decent.

The S60 player software have not been thru any facelift since the 3rd edition version, so there is not much cosmetic changes as compared to N95 8GB. It still supports the same number of audio formats and the same options. I feel that Nokia need to improve on the functionality of the player like Ratings, Play Counters, and option to scan a user specific folder instead of all the sound folders. That is one of my greatest gripe for the S60 Music Player, as it does not allow me to just scan the music folder where I place all my music collection. the result is that even ringtone files are also reflected in the music library and the whole list is damn messy.

For the camera, it is a 3.2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens. The camera settings on this phone is similar to N95 8GB, which have options like Grid View, Scene Mode, ISO mode, Contrast, Exposure, Red-eye flash, White Balance. In firmware V20, the GeoTagging feature is added to the camera as well, something not included in N95 8GB.

Geotagging is a feature where GPS coordinates will be captured and stored in the EXIF information of the photo taken with 5800. When you post the photos on the web like Flickr, you can actually see the exact location on the map where the photos were taken. To enable this function, make sure you set the GPS INFO to ON.

Even with a good lens, the sensor used in this phone is too small for light sensitivity. End result is that horrible photos under low light conditions.

The photos taken in low light condition will turn out very noisy and ugly. The photos will turn out worse if you set the ISO setting to highest sensitivity. The shutter speed is pretty slow too so you will have to hold very still even after you have pressed the shutter button.

One thing I tried to get a good shot out of low light situation is that I set the ISO to the lowest setting and I increased the exposure level by 2 notches. The photos turned out better than using the automatic mode. You can check out some of the random shots I took with phone here.

Sharing your photos couldn't be easier too. The Share Online application is tightly integrated into the Camera and Gallery application so you can upload the photos in a matter of minutes. In order to use this feature, you need to have either Flickr, Ovi or Vox account. They are free to register, so you can do so without worrying about paying anything. One of the shortcomings I see with Share Online is that it only allows up to 6 photos to be uploaded at a time. I have to see myself going thru the same procedure over a few times if I have dozens of photos to upload. It have been like this since my N95 usage. Hope Nokia can lift that kind of limitation in future firmware.

For video, the camera is also capable of recording video at 30fps with 16:9 aspect ratio, which is a welcome improvement. N95 is only capable to record at 30fps with 4:3 aspect ratio, and with widescreen LCD TVs and monitors getting mainstream, I will see the screen real estate being utilised to its full potential without 2 black bars on both sides.

For video playback, the Realplayer is used to playback MPEG4 files so we will still have to wait for third party player to enable the phone to playback DivX/Xvid files. The one I am anticipating is Coreplayer. I had it run on my N95 flawlessly.

GPS
While 5800XM is a mid-range phone, it is still equipped with GPS module. That is one of the reason why I do not mind letting go my N95 8GB for this phone.

The GPS performance I have tried so far is pretty impressive. I can get signal lock-on in less than a minute. Of course, I'm using AGPS so that will help in getting the signal lock faster. AGPS uses a very small amount of GPRS data so for those who are using pay-as-you-surf plan (which its charge is not as attractive as subscribed plan) you might want to disable it. Since I had subscribed to a flat rate plan, I have no issue turning it on.

For the GPS software, I tried both Nokia Maps 2.0 and Garmin Mobile XT. For Nokia Maps, it had proven a useful tool in my travel adventure to North Thailand back in Dec '08/Jan '09. The software managed to bring me and my riding buddy to places where hotels are available for us to bunk in. Only complaint I have on this application is the lack of details and POIs in the maps, although it is sufficient to bring us around. For the Garmin, as there is a community where they help to contribute POIs and incorporate into the map, Garmin Maps tends to have much better details on the roads and POIs. However, I have yet to test it on long distance rides, but I anticipate that it should perform on par or better than Nokia Maps but not worse. Garmin has a well-earned reputation for a good reason.

Another use of GPS for me is to track my movements during my outdoor activities. I had been using Nokia Sports Tracker since N95 and I find it to be a very good tool for tracking my activities. While it is aimed for sports, I also used it for my riding adventure tracking. My North Thailand trip is also tracked using Sports Tracker and you can view them by clicking on my Sports Tracker page to see the entries.

Internet
Another great function implemented on this mid-range phone is the WLAN. In short, I can actually connect this phone to my home network and surf the internet to my heart's content. The connection configuration to the network is pretty automatic and do not require much user intervention (except the keying in of WEP/WPA keys)

The S60 browser included had some improvements made for the touch OS. It is still a webkit-based browser and it has no problem rendering pages on most of the sites. You can press on the screen and drag up or down to scroll the page, which is very fluid. The default view is the zoomed out mode and you just need to double tap on the screen to zoom in on your desired spot.

Of course, the S60 browser is not without faults. It still have some issues rendering pages on some site like the desktop version of Hardware Zone Forums, where the browser will exit by itself unexpectedly. So what I do is install the Opera Mini as the alternative browser. It is a java-based browser but I can say that this browser performs wonderfully on all the sites that I had visited so far. Scrolling thru the pages is very fluid and response is very snappy.

I also used Joikuspot application where I can transform my phone into a internet gateway so I can surf internet on my EeePC using the phone. How it works is that the application will use my 3G connection as the internet connection and using WLAN functions to turn the phone into some form of internet access point. And I will say it worked very very well. Cool huh? Just take note that as the application is using both GPRS data and WLAN, battery life definitely suffer like hell.

For MSN communications, I used Fring, which recently just released the 5800 optimised version. I can also connect to Yahoo Chat, Google Talk, Skype and Facebook chat as well. When an application is being used by millions of S60 users, it can't be that bad right?

For my Twitter updates, I installed STEW. It is a widget where to the user, it is just another application. Setup is pretty straightforward and UI is pretty much idiotproof.

Conclusion
In summary, after a week of usage, I find that 5800XM is a good replacement for my ailing N95, as it still have all the features from the older phone, at a more affordable price. The only downgrade is the camera department but as I say, with some tweaking in the settings, I can still take some decent photos out of it.

Being the first touchscreen symbian phone, I can say that Nokia had created very good results with 5800XM, with the phones being sold out in hours and in Hong Kong it is a very common phone over there. I personally was pleasantly surprised by the responsiveness of the touchscreen and eliminated my skepticism with regards to that field.

If you can live with some of the shortcomings of this phone, this is definitely a good buy.