Yeah! I got it!

Yesterday I finally received my new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic. I’ve taken a lot of pictures of the unboxing, and right now i’m checking out the new features of the 5th edition Symbian, the new touchscreen system,  and all the other key-features of this new device!

Read the first part of the hand-on and look at the pictures! click on the images to view them in full size!

 

 

 

The Unboxing:

The box of the 5800 is surprisingly small and light, and very colorful. I’m not used to this kind of box, just because in the last years I had several Nokia phones but they were all Nseries, while this one is an XpressMusic, so maybe a little less sleek package, but surely this is a more colorful and "young" presentation of the phone.

 

 

The first thing that I noticed, when opening the box, is that the shop were I ordered the phone shipped me the wrong colour!

I ordered it in blue, but I got it in Red. Not quite a big problem for me, but may have been disappointing for someone else. Somebody told that the blue one was better looking, but I find that the red one is very good looking, too.

 

 

 The package is quite nice and there are plenty of goodies inside the box. Here’s what was inside:

- The phone (of course!) and battery, wall charger, manual, mini dvd with Nokia Pc Suite, earphones with remote control;

- The USB 2.0 cable is no longer a Mini-usb, but a new Micro-usb. However, it will not charge the phone while connected;

- Audio and Tv out cable is included too;

- There are also some goodies: A plastic/rubber case, a replacement sylus, a strap with coloured plectrum for easier touchscreen use;  very useful is the desktop stand, to place your phone standing in landscape on the table, to watch a movie or listening to music. An 8Gb MicroSd Card is already installed in the phone.

 

 

 

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Hands-on: Hardware.

 

The first thing that I thought when I took it in my hands was: wow!  Even if it has a 3.2" screen, the 5800 is, in fact, very small and light (110 gr). It’s taller, of course, if compared to a closed N95-2; but when the slide is open, the N95-2 is much longer than the 5800.

Also, the 5800 is lighter and thinner, while the n95 8gb result more bulky.

 

The only possible downside  regards the quality of the materials. In fact, the 5800 plastic is well built and overall solid, but hands it feels a little "cheaper" compared to the pleasant  "rubber" feeling of the N95-2 plastics. While I find my old phone to be the best build phone I ever had, the 5800 scores a good result, too. When I hold it firmly in hands, I don’t hear any cracks, while, for example, my old N73 was playing a concert of cracks each time I took it in my hands.

 

In the pictures below, you can see the 5800 XM dimensions compared to a Nokia N95 8Gb and a LG KT610 that i’m currently using.

 

Other hardware features:

- All the connectors are in the top side of the phone (charger connector, MicroUsb, headphone jack, on/off button);

- On one side there are two slots for the MicroSd memory and for the Sim card. On the other side, there are volume buttons, a slider for locking the phone’s touchscreen, and the shutter button for activating the camera mode.

- The stylus is included in the rear cover; when in place, it matches perfectly the rear design so you don’t even notice it. The mechanism to extract/insert the stylus is easy and solid.

- on top of the screen, the XpressMusic button can be activated by touching it; it will open a popup on screen with instant access to music, photos, videos, Internet and Share online services. Very useful, in my opinion.

- The phone is also equipped with standard features seen in previous phones, I’m talking of the accelerometer sensor, of the assisted GPS and the 3.2 Mp camera with Carl Zeiss optics and dual LED flash; there is also a second front camera for video calls.  A 8gb MicroSd card is included for storing all your music and videos; it can be upgraded up to a 16Gb card.

 

 

 

First Impressions of use:

The screen is big, if compared to other Nokia devices: but the big thing here is not the size of the screen itself; instead it’s the great resolution of 640 x 360 that makes it look really awesome. Brightness is good; and colors are quite different from my old N95 8gb: the picture below shows that clearly. In my opinion, colors are all well balanced and well rendered; My n95-2, for example, had problems in rendering red colours and black was greysh,but was great with blue; I remember that I had several problem in developing red and themes because the colour was weird on the phone’s display. So, one point for the 5800 XM!

 

The interface has several new features, but however it’s still the S60 UI, so I had no problems with the menu options and the main features; I think that in a week or so, I will get used even to advanced, specific features of the new 5th edition Symbian.

The User Interface features new, bigger icons, optimized for touch UI, and bigger text too, because at a higher resolution otherwise it would have been very difficult to read texts!

The main screen has been enhanced for touch UI. You can personalize it with an application bar, with most used applications, or with a "contact bar", that shows pictures of your most used contacts: when pressing on the thumbnails a pop up opens with option to call the contact, send a new text message, and showing the last calls to and from him. A nice solution.

On the lower part of the screen there are buttons to enable the keypad, for dialing phone numbers, and to open the phonebook.

A new factory theme is included, in red or blue, depending from your phone’s colour. It is overall a good theme, much better than previous standard themes from Nokia; however, most of the design elements look very familiar to me; it seems that someone took "inspiration" from some themes that I published in the last months! (1, 2, 3). I immediately started developing a much better red /black theme to replace it, just because I like good themes, but I prefer excellent ones

The screen auto locks after one minute or so to prevent accidental tapping (it’s a resistive touchscreen!). The only way to unlock it is to slide down the side button; Again, a very nice and practical solution, in my opinion.

 

The Touchscreen:

Of course, the major feature of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic are the touchscreen and the Touch Ui version of Symbian. So, here’s the most awaited part of the test!

I was told, before buying it, that the touchscreen of the 5800 is very, very good. They said, "much better than Samsung and Htc touchscreens, but  however not as good as iphone’s one".

Well, after testing it for 24 hours, I can surely agree with that statement. Nokia did really a good job with the 5800 touchscreen: it’s responsive, precise, and the haptic feedback is very good. Also, the software features are absolutely great,  so you can choose to write an SMS with either virtual ABC keypad, with ot without T9, or with a full screen qwerty that can be used with fingers, or with a mini-qwerty keyboard with stylus, or by directly writing the letters on the screen (handwriting recognition, cool but not very useful unless you need to write in chinese!).

All the solutions are good, probabily the fastest one to write messages and notes is the standard keypad with T9, but I think that after a little practice with the full screen qwerty, I will use that solution mainly.  Today, I tried to write a long text with my fingers in the full qwerty, and I made only two mistakes in a text of more than 600 characters. For instance, I made more mistakes when i tries to write, some days ago, an sms with an iPhone.

 

 

However, this touchscreen still misses one big thing: the multitouch technology. The multitouch is something absolutely fantastic, in my opinion, and it’s the best feature of the iPhone. While this is the only feature that beats Nokia, in my opinion, having a Nokia device with multitouch would have been the perfect solution.

Also, the screen used in the Nokia 5800 is a resistive one, meaning that it detects pressure on the screen. It would have been better, in my opinion, the use of a capacitive screen with a glass display (that is enabled only by finger’s touch; it will not work with objects and no pressure is needed). I hope to see that feature (or something even better) in next Nokia phones of 2009!

Tapping in the menu is easy, sometimes you need double tapping, but i’m easily getting used to it. The UI elements are quite big so it’s easy to tap them with fingers; however some 3rd party applications have smaller texts so that using the stylus is recommended for those.

 

 

This was the first part of my early review of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic; In the next part there will be Multimedia (Audio, Camera, Videos), Connectivity (Calls, 3G, GPS), and software reviewed, with many new pictures! Some themes are also being developed, so I tell you, Stay Tuned!