Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Review

Vinod Yalburgi

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic as the name suggests, is meant for the music and multimedia enthusiasts, and ships in three variants: Black, Red and Blue. It has a well sculpted body frame, encased in hard plastic with a hint of glossy brown finish. The body contours are well rounded, although a little on the thicker side, the phone grips well owing to its matte-finished back.

The volume/zoom controls, keylock and camera buttons are conveniently placed on one side and the SIM card and microSD card slots are placed on the side of the phone, completely unmarked. The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic lost out on user-friendliness and also on the ergonomics as a whole, due to lack of hardware keypad as was the case with Sony Ericsson's Vivaz. The touchscreen is good, considering the fact that it is resistive. Navigating around the phone is not a problem due to the large finger friendly interface of the phone but for finer usage, like handwriting or click small links, the shipped stylus would come in handy.

The Verdict:

Nokia XpressMusic 5800 is and excellent music phone and more, due to its Symbian roots and wide application base. It truly stole the limelight with its sublime performance in the loudspeaker audio clarity and bundled earphones quality test scoring 9 on 10 in each category. It delivered excellent phone earpiece volume and handsfree clarity in the signal reception and call clarity test. It stood out with its balanced sound output throughout the music test. It clearly outperformed its nearest rivals: Sony Ericsson Yari, LG GW550, Samsung Monte S5620, Samsung Corby Pro B5310 and LG GT505 running close on the heels of Nokia 6700 in the overall rating for the category. So, considering the price to features and price to performance ratio, it is a good multimedia phone for an estimated price tag of about Rs. 15,600 - which is about Rs. 11,000 cheaper than its Sony Ericsson counterpart, the Walkman flagship-phone W995. Hence, it stole the top honors as the Editor's Choice finishing second in this category with an overall rating of 7.5.

Our Ratings:

• TFT resistive touchscreen: 2.2 inches @ 360 x 640 (native resolution)
• 81 MB internal storage, microSD slot expandable up to 16GB, 8GB microSD card shipped
• 3.2MP camera @ 2048x1536 (max.resolution)
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, GPS with A-GPS support