Stardust Global Ventures

I recently acquired a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic through my mom Sheryl, her fiancé Ken, and their friend Andy. I acquired this phone from my mom, on one condition. That condition being that I would write a review for the phone, so here I am.

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is according to other reviews quite an astonishing phone, as far as Nokia and Music go together, from what I’ve read. I personally, have used it more for texting – as any adolescent teenager would in today’s world – as well as wifi, and picture taking combined with picture uploading.

I’m certain that I’m not the first to say it, and I’m sure I won’t be the last, but I love this phone over-all. I’ve had use of two other Nokia phones through Mom and Ken, the Nokia N73, and the Nokia N78, prior to this 5800, and neither one of them was as “fun” or “cool” as this one.

The phone has a very convenient stylus, but, it’s not a requirement. You can use the touch screen with just the tip of your fingers. However, I do recommend that if you use such a primitive tool as your own finger, you wash your hands, or have a screen cleaner and rag available, to keep the grease build up down.

For the generic, but dying technology of basic phone calls, this phone is adequate, with an easy-to-use volume control button on the side of the phone, and easily operated touch-screen buttons for your various answering options.

As for dialing a phone number, well the touch pad is a little confusing at first, because the keys are small, and the touch pad can be a bit slow to catch on to the fact that you’ve actually keyed in a digit, but if you’re using the stylus you won’t likely notice the difference. If you’re going to just call a contact it’s not too hard to scroll through a list and select one to call, and which of their potentially many phone numbers to dial.

Texting is quite fun here actually. You may either manually input the number you wish to text by tapping the Recipient area once firmly with your finger or stylus and inputting the number with the number pad, or you may add a number or multiple numbers from your contact list. As for the actual message? Well, it’s similar to manually inputting a number to text: tap the text area firmly once, and the key-pad appears. You now have to turn your phone side-ways and decide whether to use the stylus, or whether to type with your thumbs. My personal choice for speed, and amusement is using my thumbs, but if I want a higher degree of accuracy, I’ll pull out the stylus for the search-and-peck method of typing. Then just hit the check-mark, click the closed envelope which is the send button, and you’re done.

So, the texting bit also touches on the fact that there’s more than one way to view the phone. You can look at it vertically as you would most, or you can flip it on its side and it will act similarly to the iPhone or iPod Touch, I believe, and rotate the icons. Of course, this only seems to work once you’ve opened one of the menus. The unfortunate thing, is that on your main wallpaper, this option is not apparently available. You can put your favorite contacts onto the wallpaper, but you can’t have them rotate with your phone like when you’re in the main menus.

As this is the first phone I’ve ever honestly used to access wifi, I can’t exactly make any unbiased comments on the speed, though I’ll make a comment anyway. Speed can always be improved.

The phone does a pretty good job of playing YouTube videos, and the sound quality is surprisingly exceptional, as is the volume capability. The video quality could be better, but we’re looking at 640×360 pixels so in all honesty you can’t ask for much better than you’ve got.

Moving on to photos: There is a 3.2 megapixel camera on this phone. Once again, when you take into account the size of the lens, the photo quality of the camera is really surprisingly exceptional. You won’t be taking any professional grade photos, to include in a photographer’s portfolio, but certainly adequate for on-the-fly captures of moments that just need a picture to be able to describe them. And when you’ve gone and taken a picture, if you have wifi, and a flickr account, you can upload photos right from your phone to your flickr account, fairly quickly.

Music quality on the phone is exceptional, as I stated in my comments about YouTube with this phone. The volume reaches surprising levels for such a small device, and the quality is not terribly distorted as it would be with a lower-end phone.
The transfer speed from computer to phone through your USB connection is also great. I didn’t know the exact specification, so I looked it up, and it is advertised at 4mb/s transfer rate.

The music application includes ability to make on the go playlists, and organize your songs in different ways.
The one downfall is that you either have to manually input the music files by accessing your phone memory or memory card on “My Computer” and drag-and-drop the music into the phone memory, or you have to use Windows Media Player to synchronize songs – that is unless, my phone and computer combination just don’t optimize transferring capabilities.

On a whole, I have to reiterate that I love the Nokia 5800. There is however room for improvement, including more options for what to include on your wallpaper, as far as icons go, perhaps, since it’s the Nokia 5800 “XpressMusic” a music icon should be included. And then there’s the potential for improving wifi speed. To go along the subject of speed, the touch-pad needs to be improved so that your touches register a little bit faster and easier, rather than having to almost hit the screen at times. The last thing I think needs to be improved would be not the transfer speed, but the ease of transferring, and program compatibility for transferring music and sound data. But all in all, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic lives up to its name, and is a magnificent, and amusing phone.