Nokia kindly gave us their first foray into the pure touch screen handset market to review just over a month ago and I’m glad we here at TMV did have the time to play around with the handset for a full month to give a real and in-depth overview of the devices pros and cons. As you will be aware TMV did have a very brief try out of the device at Nokia’s Comes with Music launch last October in London.
Look and Feel/Design
The phone is rather light weighing in at (find figure). Look and feel is strong and solid, however the overall footprint is chunky compared to an iPhone or the blackberry storm (or any other touch screens LG, Samsung et al). The phones durability cannot be faulted as I managed to accidentally drop it twice without its protective cover and the handset was impervious to the abuse.
I’m sure if it was instead an iPhone or Storm it would have had a cracked screen minimum. Yet overall, visually, the Nokia 5800 is about as unsexy as you can get in terms of touch screen mobile devices.
Camera
The camera opens when shutter is clicked and at 3.2 mega pixel hardly close to a Sony Eriksson c series, LG or Samsung, but a lot better than the measly 2.0 mega pixel camera in the iPhone.
Navigation/Display/Discover
As with the iPhone the device switches your viewing from portrait to landscape using its on board sensors albeit I did find it a bit slower than the iPhone in this respect. When viewing in portrait mode, the width of the screen is too narrow, making touch-screen navigation quite tricky. Actually using the touch screen is relatively easy albeit not as intuitive as the iPhone – it is miles ahead of LG or Samsung touch screen phones. I have a big problem with the
Sound/speakers
The in-built speakers are VERY loud. Best we’ve ever heard on a mobile device. No doubt sure to drive bus and train commuters everywhere absolutely bonkers, but absolutely great for those intimate picnics and sun-tanning sessions at the beach. We love the standard 3.5ml headphone jack which has become pretty much standard in most handsets since the middle of last year.
Battery
This is one area where the 5800 excels’. Hands down it beats any touch screen in the market I know about. Only needed to charge once every 48 hours or so – and this was with fairly heavy voice and wifi use.
Memory
The handset comes with 8 gb standard so is on par with most competitors there, albeit we found it extremely difficult to open the sd mirco format memory slot.
Music Features
We left these till last because there are numerous including; a radio, real player and a Microsoft media player. But as always mircosoft media players are a pain for mac users like myself.
TMV did like the fact you can use any of the following search functions to get to your music; song, artist, album, playlist, genre and most interesting composers which when looking back at Chris Mclellan’s recent post on the digital classical music market is a great nod to connoisseur’s of classical music.
Summary
All in all, TMV’s verdict is that the Nokia 5800 is a very run of the mill handset and we did experience some serious bugs whereby the handset would just freeze up and then have to be re-booted – rather frustrating that it started to occur with daily regularity after just two weeks of use. Overall a reasonable first attempt at the touch screen market but TMV would have thought Nokia could have out trumped apple in term so UI and sexyness.
Sadly not so this time round. Yet do Nokia have to worry about iPhone? Not really as Nokia already ahs the largest market share especially in the emerging markets where the next decade of handset dominance will really be played out!
TMV give the Nokia 5800 handset 6/10
