Nokia 5800 XpressMusic - The Great Pretender? It's the apple in my eye... (Nokia 5800 XpressMusic)

Member Name: msbreviews

Product:	Nokia 5800 XpressMusic
Date:	20/07/09 (60 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, buckets of information at your fingertips, fun and affordable.

Disadvantages: It is almost too good, too useful and too distracted.

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic - The Great Pretender??

In the recent rush to break the iPhone's dominance in the touchscreen market, the major mobile manufacturers have all released some form of phone with this new capability. For some this rush to capitalise on such a profitable niche has produced some woefully basic and primary pastiches of Apple's elegant creation. Nokia - famed for functionality - have managed to side-step what appead to be an inevitable fate for them, and, with the 5800, might have offered us an affordable alternative.

Pros:

There is an understated simplicity to the phone and the main menu screen. With the expected nokia applications all there and the addition of Nokia Maps. Using the built in GPS system Nokia Maps contains EVERYTHING you could possibly ask for from a portable device, to the extent where you could feel giddy with the choice it offers. It will locate you to with a few metres and then offer to inform you about locations of addresses, places to Eat and Drink, Going Out and Entertainment, Sights and Museums, Transport, Accommodation, Shopping, Business and Services and Leisure and Outdoors. It almost verges into the area of being too useful as the wealth of choice (bars and pubs within the surrounding few MILES) now offers up so many new options that it becomes difficult to pick just one.
The Camera and Video funtion are so simple to use it makes defunct the need for an extra camera to the majority of people. The menu sets out 12 different options all on the large screen and will inspire you to experiment with the exposure and colour tone and light sensitivity when you see the option there. And with 8GB to use on the memory card it is so far beyond useful as to be sychophantic.
That Memory card is ideal when you start to use the 5800's capability for music storage and listening. First to note is the exclusive speaker technology that actually means your favourite songs can be heard clearly and loudly straight from your phone wherever you want to play them, without a metalic whine which has made that feature so useless on nearly all phones previously.
The second fantastic idea is for the phone to contain a socket for the headphones which you already own and love, and not an odd and easily breakable socket for some limp plastic excuse for headphones that were so mindlessly proscribe before.
Messaging, when practiced, will become much quicker and far more enjoyable with the full screen qwerty keyboard which allows you to type away with an automatic glee. For those not comfortable there is a function to type in the old number key format.
And finally the touchscreen itself; this is much more than a novelty for this phone. The internet capabilities of most smartphones now require a phone to be able to mimic a computer screen and mouse; and with such a new technology being made available to more than just those skinny, young professional types the Nokia includes sensible ideas to allow the wider public to gain a similar sort of access to the information and content out there. There is a handy little stylus the slots into the back of the phone and the screen itself vibrates when you have successfully selected something on the screen; whether that be letters on the keyboard or link on a website, this allows you to gain confidence and speed when searching and browsing.

Cons:

The battery life is heroic for the amount of task you can ask this Nokia to do at once. You can listen to your music, browse the internet, write a message whilst keeping everything open and running and then take a call without anything being closed down. But once you see the fun and use of all these applications you can view the need to recharge fully, nightly as being a little frustrating.

In a bid to keep up with Apple's lucrative market, the 5800's applications page, a second menu, is overcrowded with too much that you would use too little. Most of it is sadly forgotten.

The wealth of features on the phone can actually become a little cumbersome in itself just through the fact of finding yourself distracted from keeping up the calendar pages as on previous mobiles, or replying to friends, and now constantly checking Facebook in one simply push of a button.

The inabillity to be able to personalise the phone is a shame as this could completely secure the Nokia 5800 as being the absolute best mobile phone around with the technology available.

Conclusion.
It's a touchscreen that is affordable, and fun, and stylish, and useful, would help you win every pub quiz, solve every argument, find every supermarket, learn about photography... In fact the biggest charm about the phone - how it can connect you to everything nearly anywhere, ironically is the greatest undoing of this phone. People say that with all this technology and social networking that we are speaking to each other less, and with this phone you can understand why; instead of asking my girlfriend whether she enjoyed the film at the cinema, I'm sat in my seat, blocking the aisle, looking up who the supporting actor was on IMDB...
The biggest request you could have of this phone is that you could find a way to harness, use and organise the information and functions that it offers to you.

Summary: Keep up with your friends, or replace them...do it all with the Nokia 5800

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