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Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Review

I ran the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic to a lot of stress test to dig beyond the touchscreen hype and found some surprisingly great features as well as shortcomings. Let me share with you why I thought the Nokia 5800 falls short of expectations but will remain on top of a lot of people’s must-buy list.


5800 review

Yugatech 728x90 Reno7 Series

Make and Construction
When I first read that the Nokia 5800 has a 3.2 inch (360×640 pixel) display screen. The three buttons at the lower part of the screen serve as shortcuts (Call knob, App Launcher and Cancel/End button — from left to right.) The other keys on the side include a dedicated camera button and volume controls. The SIM card slot (usually placed inside the battery compartment) is found on the left side along with the microSD card slot for easy access.

There’s a well placed slider-lock at the center-right side of the device that serves as a screen lock/unlock mechanism (easily reached by the right thumb or the left middle finger when holding the phone).nokia 5800 review

Aside from the glass screen, the entire device is made up of plastic so it feels light for its size. It’s a little thick at 15.5mm. I think it would have been nicer to the grip at 12mm or 13mm. The phone’s casing feels solid but battery cover suffers from the usual creaks (pretty common with NSeries phones). The hard-rubber carrying case is nice and the plectrum, which doubles as a stylus, can be attached to the case to avoid being misplaced. 

Connectivity and Mobile Web

The Nokia 5800 comes with all sorts of wireless connectivity – 3G/HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS — so it’s all set in that department.

Nokia’s built-in browser is generally good, especially on smaller screens especially that of the E63 and E71. Of course, they had to do something different for the 5800’s bigger screen but I felt the real-estate wasn’t maximized so you don’t get a great surfing experience. The browser is fast and displays flash files, but doesn’t render pages with javascripts well. The all-important back/forward buttons are also missing. Despite that, the pages load fast and the scaled images and texts are crisp (almost as good as on Opera Mini).

Usability and UI

The phone came with a stylus (with an extra one) and a plectrum (guitar pick) which gives you an impression that you will be using them more often that just your fingers when navigating the touch screen UI. Personally, I have an aversion to stylus as they remind me of the old, clunky PDAs. There’s haptic feedback which I think is a necessary feature for resistive touchscreens.

 

Fortunately, with the 5800, you are still able to make a phone call and send text messages with one hand, though half the time you’d end up using your fingernails instead of your thumb. The 5800 gives you 4 options for text input — full QWERTY, mini QWERTY (for portrait mode), handwriting recognition and the normal virtual phone keypad — which is nice because it provides the user more ways to type in text depending on the need and screen orientation. The system remembers your last input method and shows it in future instances until you change it.

 
  

The Media Bar is a small touch sensitive portion of the phone just at the top outer border of the screen that drops down to some shortcuts — Music Manager, Video Center, Internet and Photos.

The touchscreen is quite responsive but sometimes, it requires two taps to select an item or hotspot. Scrolling down with the finger takes a bit of practice and can become easy but scrolling up is almost impossible (that’s when you need to use the stylus). Haptic feedback makes things much easier though.

Multimedia & Photo Quality

The sound speakers are the loudest I’ve ever heard on a mobile phone and worthy of being in the XpressMusic class. I find it odd though that the speakers were unevenly placed on both the left side of the phone which makes me wonder that if you position it horizontally on the cradle for some hands-free movie viewing, both speakers are facing downwards (not upwards where the sound will have more open space to propagate). I guess that adds to the bass effect.

 nokia 5800 carl zeiss nokia 5800 iphone 3gnokia 5800 case

Video quality is good but not very impressive. If you compare the 5800’s 3.2″ screen at 360×640 resolution against the Xperia X1’s 3″ @ 480×800 pixel, you can see which screen has more pixels packed per square inch (more pixels per square inch, better video quality). The Nokia Video Manager (an app that automatically converts video files transferred to the phone) makes a low-quality compressesion that videos played on the 5800 ends up very pixelated. I converted my own videos (using Super) to match the settings I use for the iPhone 3G and while the output was better, the videos still appear dithered and the colors a bit faded.

I was puzzled why 3.2MP Carl Zeiss camera didn’t perform as well as other Nokia phones with the same optics. I took several sample photos below: 

nokia 5800 photos nokia 5800 photos nokia 5800 photos

Doesn’t work well at night and the dual-LED flash only performs better on close up shots. The picture of the steel Buddha here can be compared to the same taken with the Nokia N78 here.

What’s Missing or What I Would Have Wanted

  • USB port charging. Nokia already did it with the N85 so I don’t understand why the newer models don’t have it.
  • Updated firmware. The unit that I had some occasional hang-ups (apps not exiting properly) and one instance that the phone rebooted on its own.
  • Internal Storage. There’s only about 90MB of internal phone memory. The phone comes with an 8GB external microSD card so the only way to expand your storage is by replacing it with a bigger capacity (like 16GB).
  • Faster Processor. Sometimes, you’ll feel that the ARM 11 369 MHz CPU is slow. The Qualcomm MSM7201A 528 Mhz processor would have been better (the ones on the HTC Touch HD and SE Experia X1).

Of course, some of the items in this list would affect the phone’s final price so it’s a trade-off.

Conclusion

Over-all, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is a nice-to-have phone but fell short of my expectation as a flagship touchscreen phone. I guess, and because Nokia was late in the game, I expected them to score high in changing the way touchscreen phones interact with its user. The device’s dependence with the stylus ruined the experience (just like many stylus-touting touchscreen phone) and the plectrum was just a fancy addition that serve no extra function other than it symbolizes music (as in XpressMusic).

The S60 platform holds a lot of promise. It was great with a lot of NSeries and ESeries Nokia phones but it needs to be refined more for the touch screen. Had the Nokia 5800 been launched in January (or even June) of 2008, I would have given it more excuse. If this was the first touch screen phone I’ve ever used, I might have liked it a lot but after trying out the Omnia, Xperia X1, Touch HD, LG Cookie and iPhone, I’d put the 5800 somewhere in the middle.

nokia 5800 touch 

What’s most surprising with the Nokia 5800 is the price tag. It’s already a high-end phone but the price seemed unbelievably affordable. We’ve seen the N96 priced at 37k and the Nokia 8800 Arte at 47k. Even the 2-year old Nokia N95 8GB is more expensive than the 5800 — and this tells us something about how Nokia perceives its flagship touchcsreen phone.

Nokia knows its the king of alphanumeric candybar phones. It’s also getting a good boost in the qwerty smartphones. Yet, they are relatively behind the touchscreen race (despite the fact that they already had a discontinued touch screen phone 5 years ago) although this battleground is still fresh. Most consumers are wary to shell out 30k or 40k for a touch interface they are not familiar with so the 5800 is positioned really well as an affordable full-featured touchscreen phone.

For its features, I think the Nokia 5800 is still worthy to be priced at the 25k to 35k range but Nokia puts it at a very sweet spot of Php19,990. They did this to play catch with the rest and I believe they’d done a great job with marketing it as such. Nokia fans will surely love owning this little piece of history from Nokia.

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Avatar for Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

946 Responses

  1. Avatar for john john says:

    lahat yan masosolve ng flash the O.S of the phone to v63, nice ang feature nya, especially yung mga Custom rom na 5800 firmware kasi mafefeel mo yung bilis at may dating na talaga and take note, hindi na certificate error dahil kahit ano iinstall mo gagana, eto yung link na alam ko,

    http://forum.dailymobile.se/index.php?topic=57247.0

    at eto rin

    http://phadly87.blogspot.com/2011/04/please-wait.html

    magiiba yung pakiramdam mo sa [phone mo ,

    basta sundin nyo lang yung instruction kasi pwede ka magkaprob sa process but di naman ganu mahirap ayusin , battery lang talaga ata prob, try nyo kasi luma na si 5800 pero operational pa rin siya at sumisipa talaga ng malakas, =D gwapo pa rin lalo na yung UI nya…

  2. Avatar for ryel ryel says:

    mayroon akong nokia 5800 mahigit 1 year na, ang problema ko lang ay malabo ang camera kahit na 3.2megafixel? thanks

  3. Avatar for Irvin Guider Irvin Guider says:

    Wonderful paintings! That is the kind of information that are supposed to be shared around the net. Shame on Google for not positioning this post upper! Come on over and visit my website . Thanks =)

  4. Avatar for robert robert says:

    san b k makakabili ng housing ng silver edition ng 5800 navigation?? tnx

  5. Avatar for techihunt techihunt says:

    will there be any update available after 52.00 then please let me know & wish to update my phone without hooking up to pc just how to do it

  6. Avatar for suwail suwail says:

    how much is this phone for pesos?.

  7. Avatar for Ren Ren says:

    I had my n5800 more than a year ago. But lately i am having problems with the screen. It does not detect anymore. I don’t have a cellphone for almost 2 months now. i have thought of considering getting a postpaid plan so i can get a new phone. But i love my n5800. Can the screen still be fixed??? please help, how much is a touch screen replacement though?

  8. Avatar for finder finder says:

    anu ba gagawin para maging free ung gps, smart user ako, nag chacharge sila ng 5 pesos eh,, pls give me the tricks,

  9. Avatar for reeya reeya says:

    so far so good. purchased my cp last Nov. 2009 and still working great. comparing to the touchscreen cps out now. my 5800 is not too behind. ;) still one of the best.

  10. Avatar for ran ran ran ran says:

    Where to upgrade my version nokia 5800 to nokia 8?
    anyone know shops here in taft manila where i can upgrade my version to n8 i have founded a site that teaches people on how to upgrade their phone to n8 here is the link http://forum.dailymobile.se/index.php?topic=35320.0 i wanted that n8 version.

  11. Avatar for pjmc pjmc says:

    hello!
    How much now the nokia 5800 in PESOS…
    tnx…

  12. Avatar for smiley smiley says:

    nokia 5800 is the best phone for me.

  13. Avatar for bermark bermark says:

    i will have a nokia 5800 cellphone nxt month Luv it extremely excited . . (:

    i need to know some specipication to make what i supposed to do

    thnx! a lot it really help. . (:

  14. Avatar for ATIF ALI ATIF ALI says:

    Such a lovely cell phone…

  15. Avatar for candy candy says:

    pa anu ba ma resolve yung problem dito sa n5800 na pg nag download ako ng games or application sa OVI e my nka labas sa phone na EXPIRED CERTIFICATE? help nmn poh.. hndi po kasi ako mka pg download nang games at applications.. salamat poh..

    • Avatar for frank frank says:

      mag download ka muna nang nokia software updater sa pc mo, tapus install mo siya at sundin mo lang ang mga steps doon bastat una ang pag download nang software updater sa pc mo

  16. Avatar for benny benny says:

    ok naman mag upgrade. v52 yung sa akin. gamit jaf. some games that works well in nokia 5800 are here http://nokiadloads.blogspot.com

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