Don't Nok It Mk II (Nokia 5510)

Member Name: JPShooter

Product:	Nokia 5510
Date:	29/12/01 (822 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: 64MB Memory, radio, QWERTY keyboard

Disadvantages: Software, fairly large

My second review for a mobile phone, this time for the Nokia 5510.

I saw this phone really as a luxury rather than a necessity when I was deciding on a new contract. I wanted something a little bit different, and this seemed to fit the bill. Although I already have an mp3 player (my first review coincidentally), I thought this one would be very useful as I would not have to keep buying new batteries for it, and it had a radio as well. "What the hell" I thought, and got it for my Christmas present.

The phone as a phone does everything you would expect it to - it tells you everything that previous Nokias have, duration, names, numbers, times of call. The one thing it did have missing that I wanted was a composer for the ring tones - I assume we are all meant to join Club Nokia to get these sorts of things. But I had to get Match Of The Day onto it somehow, so I sent it from my dad's phone. Whew. Panic over.

The phone as radio performs as well as any other phone/radio I've used. The antenna is inside the cable provided with the package, used as a pair of earphones and a hands-free device should you want to use it this way. It has 10 preset stations, and most importantly of all, it can pick up SGR Ipswich. Brilliant.

The phone as a music player is probably why you;re reading the review, it's definetly why I would be. In comparison to my Thomson Lyra, it boasts the same quality in music playback. It also has a 'graphic equaliser', which equalises to 9 presets that affect the output, which is more than my Lyra (although the Lyra offers a more 'real' equaliser). It holds 64MB of storage, which depending on how you compress your music, holds between 1 hour and 2 hours of music. Transfer is done via PC, external source (such as stereo) or you can record from the radio on the phone, but from PC - phone is via USB. This is supposed to be fast, but it is around as fast as my Lyra, which tra
nsfers via my parallel port. The main gripe comes about the software.

Nokia Audio Manager is bad software. This hardly surprised me, the special edition of Real Jukebox that came with my Lyra was pathetic, but this is worse. I wouldn't go so far as to call it the worst piece of software I have used, but it's up there. I can see why it is - it has to do something complicated, and Nokia would also have been wary of the many possibilities for pirated songs to be recorded to and from the player. But still, it should perform better than this. My main complaint is that the software converts any mp3 you want to convert into a file with the extension .lse. This apparently means it has been protected for for local use (meaning if it ain't lse, it's not going on the player). This is fine, but it copies it to your hard disk as well as the player. I've tried to stop it doing this, but it does this to save you doing it again later. Great. But what if I have over 1GB of mp3's? And that's nothing compared to what some people have. So my hard disk space could just disappear should I keep all these .lse files. Which I won't.

The phone is realitively bulky, compared to my previous Nokia 3310, but in exchange for the features I don't mind. The QWERTY keyboard I do like, it stops that mind-numbingly stupid "Autospell" function. It is quite fidgety though, as the keys are quite small, which also makes it difficult to play Snake II. It comes with a new game, Bumper, which is a pinball-type game, and seems quite jolly, if you like that sort of thing. The underside of the phone has sockets for the headset and hands-free kit and the charger, and the side has sockets for the data transfer from PC and stereo, as well as buttons to start the radio, music player and volume controls. I like these buttons - they're well-placed in my opinion and are a lot better than going through all the menus to get the damn r
adio to start.

All in all, I like the phone very much, it's the software that comes with it that I have issues with. If only someone could provide software to transfer mp3's to an external device that doesn't involve the coputer crashing and the software giving up.

Summary: