Nokia N8 Review

Nokia, the leading of mobile phone manufacturer that has lost a lot of its market share in the recent years, wants to return to the top of the world in the field and. After the presentation a few weeks ago on the Nokia World 201,0 the Finnish giant intends to meet the onslaught of the iPhone.

The Nokia N8 has been officialy released. It is a model that we believe will make a havoc of sales and now we will explain why in the following Nokia N8 review:

The price and release date

The technical features of Nokia N8, as announced, are very powerful:  the 12-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens and Xenon flash puts it directly on top as the most powerful camera phone ever, and only this specific enough by itself to explain the power of the phone, but we do not stop here, because we also have the pleasure to announce that N8 is the first device to have the Symbian OS ^ 3, that would bring several new features like: pinch zooming, scrolling and multi-touch and it also supports multitasking. It ‘available in gray, black, pea green, dark blue and orange color.

Nokia N8 Camera

Going back to the camera can also record video in high definition (HD), which can be edited and modified thanks to special applications in your phone. It ’s a multimedia phone and confirms that it is possible to use WebTV services (watch many TV channels worldwide in streaming) and see the same videos in HD audio system with Dolby Digital Plus.

Social Networking

But why do take such beautiful pictures and videos if you can not share them? Nokia N8 developers must have thought of this as associate this mobile social networking (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, etc. ..) is simple: you can upload photos directly, calendar sync to the phone online, direct links in the homescreen and many other things you will surely love the convenience of online life.

The pictures are likely to take a lot of memory space and that is why the Finnish company Nokia has decided to equip N8 with 16 GB of internal memory, which is expandable (up to 48 GB) thanks to the MicroSD support. Maps is free and there are maps of 70 countries available. It ‘also a USB port to export the data and an HDMI to connect it to TV. The battaria is long term, it supports music playback for up to 50 hours.

Nokia, the leader of mobile phones, wants to return to the top of the world in the field and, after an incident a few weeks of the Nokia World 2010, an occasion during which he presented his new terminals C6, C7, E8 and N8, gave away yesterday at his sale in Italy of one of the top models of her new creations, the Nokia N8, with news that the Finnish giant intends to meet the onslaught of the iPhone.

“With the Nokia N8 and the new Symbian software, we are taking on the most popular smartphone platform in the world and a familiar user experience faster and more intuitive,” said Jo Harlow, Senior Vice President, Smartphones, Nokia, which also stressed as the N8 has received the highest number of pre-orders from consumers in the history of Nokia.

Based on the new Symbian OS, the Nokia N8 focuses on speed and ease of use and multitasking. Incorporates a 12 megapixel camera that takes pictures of high quality and allows you to record movies in HD quality, users of this phone will also have the ability to edit pictures and videos from your screen and choose from multiple ways to share, transfer large files to an external hard drive with USB-on-the-go, or upload photos to social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter or Renren directly from the main screen.

The Nokia N8 is also equipped with an AMOLED display 3.5 ‘glass has the Ovi free feature maps, which offers free surfing walk & drive in over 70 countries, shows the routes of public transport in 85 cities around the world, the real-time traffic, safety camera warnings, the availability of parking and petrol stations and information on speed limits.

Conclusion

It really looks like a five-star ultra-luxury mobile phone, we strongly recommend that you buy for, especially if you love photography, you will not find anything better and the price also related to the quality of the product is very low.

Nokia N8 price will be around 450 Euros, which is about 620 USD dollars including taxes and should be on sale from the third quarter of 2010 on some markets at least.

Pros: camera, display, battery lifetime

Cons: New Symbion OS takes time to get used to



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Nokia nuron mobile reviews

Nokia’s first affordable touch screen phone, the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music, sold like hotcakes in Europe and was available unlocked with AT&T 3G in the US. No love for T-Mobile folks and no contract subsidies in the US meant not very wide distribution for this touch screen phone. The Nokia 5230 followed more recently in Europe as a “Comes with Music” phone, a subscription all you can eat music service that isn’t available in the US. The Nokia Nuron shares much of the 5800’s DNA and almost all the DNA of the Euro 5230 with an almost identical design and the same resistive 360 x 640 touch screen. The price is nice at $69.99 with contract given the phone’s low to mid-range smartphone feature set that includes a GPS with Ovi Maps free navigation, Bluetooth with A2DP stereo, a 3.5mm stereo jack and a 2 megapixel camera. Alas there’s no WiFi and that camera resolution is at the low end for a Nokia phone. The Nuron (Nokia Nuron 5230) is a Symbian OS 9.4 smartphone running Nokia’s S60 5th Edition software. If you’re already a Nokia S60 user, you’ll likely feel right at home, even if you’ve never used the touch screen 5th Edition version. The icons, menus and metaphors are largely the same. That’s great for familiarity, but the user interface still isn’t ideally touch optimized as it is with the iPhone 3GS and Android (two mobile operating systems that were designed from the ground up for touch rather than being ports of d-pad centric product lines). Since Nokia has released six 5th Edition phones, starting with the high end Nokia N97, we’d hoped they’d have evolved the UI more. But the new ^Symbian phones are coming later this year, and we assume Nokia didn’t want to spend much more development time with S60. What exactly bothers us? It’s not just the resistive touch screen, which has its good points: you can use it with gloves and fingernails and it’s more precise. Yes, you do have to press a bit harder than on the iPhone or Motorola Cliq XT, but it’s not a wretched task. What we don’t like is that you actually have to use skinny scroll bars in some places, and those are certainly not finger-friendly and are terribly dated. In some cases you have kinetic scrolling and in others you don’t. Since this isn’t a capacitive display, there’s no pinch zooming. In some places you must single-tap on an item and in other places a double-tap is required. Good gosh, these kinds of things should have been sorted out long ago. The on-screen keyboard isn’t the easiest to use, but once you remember it’s not capacitive and that you must pay attention and precisely tap the key you want, it’s passable. But there are things to like as well: once you get used to how the UI works, it’s easy enough to fly around the screen and get things done. It’s a fun phone to use, though it gets sluggish at times running on an ARM11 434MHz processor with a lean amount of available RAM. The smartphone is compact and very light at 3.98 ounces, and it makes the Cliq XT look like a battleship. Like the Nokia 5800 and 5230, the phone’s hardware is laid out a bit differently from most phones. Nokia ships the phone with a sticker over the display that lets you know that the SIM card slot and microSD card slots are under rubber doors on the side of the phone instead of under the battery door. The Nuron has a screen lock slider on the right, a feature common in recent Nokia phones. It’s easy to operate and saves you from the two step touch the power button then slide on the screen to unlock method that we find tedious. There are dedicated hardware call send and end buttons and a center key that opens up the programs window. These are mechanical buttons and work easily. A touch sensitive button lives at the top right corner above the display and this launches a shortcut bar to the multimedia apps. There’s a standard 3.5mm stereo jack up top (music is one of the phone’s strong points) and a dedicated camera button. The volume buttons are on the right and they control everything except ringer volume (you must use the Profiles settings to change the ringer volume which seems a little silly).

As we’ve come to expect from Nokia phones, the Nuron has excellent voice quality and strong reception. If making calls and holding a signal are important to you, the Nuron is definitely a good choice. It has better reception than the Cliq XT and Nexus One Android phones. Again, like most Nokia phones, the Nuron plays well with Bluetooth headsets, car kits and stereo headsets– it’s not finicky in the least. The contacts application is the usual Nokia affair with plenty of fields. The PIM applications sync with Outlook on the desktop, but there’s no iSync plugin (at least not yet). Using the Ovi Store application, you can download Mail for Exchange which supports syncing with MS Exchange 2003 and 2007 as well as Google contacts and calendar.

We’re a bit disappointed that the phone has only 3.6 Mbps 3G HSDPA when most T-Mobile smartphones are now shipping with the faster 7.2 Mbps flavor. The Nuron is a quad band GSM world phone with 3G on T-Mobile’s US 1700/2100MHz bands. It features Nokia’s usual webkit-based web browser that really impressed us 3 years ago but now looks a little weak compared to the Android and iPhone browsers. It’s not bad though and does a good job of rendering desktop sites (and it’s much better than RIM’s BlackBerry web browser). Email comes in the form of Nokia Messaging, which is functional but not sexy. The phone works with POP3, IMAP, Gmail and MS Exchange email (Exchange support is a free download).

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Nokia E72 Mobile Phone

Happy news for all Text-Freaks!!! Hot on the heels is a Symbian smartphone from Nokia, that too with a QWERTY Keyboard! Labelled Nokia E72 Mobile Phone, it is the successor ofNokia E71 Mobile Phone, the hot selling business phone released recently. Do not think that it is the same old wine in a different bottle! Nokia E72 3G Mobile Phone comes with lot of meliorations compared to its predecessor, out of which some are listed here. The camera is beefed up from 3MP to 5MP in the latest model. Moreover in E72 software is enhanced to compete with the recently released phones.

Nokia E72 has a close resemblance to the Blackberry phones. No wonder why it is nicknamed “NokiaBerry.” 2.4-inch display with a modest resolution of 320 x 240 pixels provides ample back up for messaging applications. Apart from the rich messaging settings, lots of other applications such as standard email clients, business systems like Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes, etc. and even webmail applications like Hotmail and Gmail can be integrated with this mobile phone. This phone supports many of the popular instant messaging clients too. “Optical Navi Key” is introduced in this mobile phone to make scrolling and user controls effortless. Moreover the interface is also altered to make it easier to use and more responsive as well.

This S60 device back heaps of productivity applications. Updated version of QuickOffice 5.3that can also handle Office 2007 documents is housed in this handset to cater the needs of the entrepreneur users. VPN support and remote wipe are some among the useful features hosted by this smartphone. This 3.5G device supports HSDPA and HSUPA high speed data transfer with a maximum download speed of 10.2Mbps. All current connectivity options like Wi-Fi , bluetooth stereo (A2DP) and USB connection are present in this hand-held device. 5MP camera with flash and autofocus is clung into the backside of the phone. Videos can be shot at 15fps at 640 x 480 pixels resolution using this camera.

GPS system along with the integrated compass, 3.5mm audio socket, FM radio, multi-format multimedia player, etc. are other noteworthy features of this mobile phone. 1500MAh battery is stationed in this handset to showcase excellent power performance. A talk-time of 6 hours (3G)/12.5hours(GSM) and a standby time of 24 days. With broader design, this mobile measures about 114 x 58 x 10mm, and it is slightly on the heavier side with 128grams. Three colour variants are released for Nokia E72 5MP camera Mobile Phone; the available colours are zodiac black, metal grey and topaz brown. Expected to hit the market by the end of Q3, Nokiaberry is also anticipated to gain popularity just like its siblings!

Check out our free bundle offers and best deals.

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Nokia E75 Review

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Nokia doesn’t take chances when it comes to business phones, but is the E75 able to bridge the gap between the E90 and E71?

There haven’t been many surprises from Nokia this year, since its 2009 road map leaked out last year. The E75 was therefore well known about before its announcement, and released shortly after.
Because of the slide-out keyboard, you might think the phone is the replacement to the E90 Communicator, but you’d be wrong. The E75 may be smaller and lighter, but it’s no successor.

For a start, it has to make do with just one display – a QVGA one that’s much smaller than the E90’s wide internal screen. Secondly, the keyboard lacks a dedicated row for entering numbers and symbols, so you must use a separate key before pressing them. The other thing to consider is the fact that the E90 was pretty advanced for its time, thus already having a 3.2-megapixel autofocus camera (with flash) and GPS receiver.

Smaller and tighter

So, if that’s the case, then what is the point of the E75? Well, there are plenty of good things going for the latest Eseries phone. Firstly, it’s the size of an ordinary mobile phone, meaning it’s a lot smaller than the E90, and it now has the latest version of Series 60: 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2. This brings a series of improvements and optimisations, including improved phonebook access and calendar management, plus some eye candy in the form of animated menu transitions and screen rotations. You’ll need to turn them on in the control panel, but just takes a few seconds and is only needed once.

For a long time Nokia played things safe on its Enterprise range by using the older version of S60, so the company must now feel confident that it’s got FP2 stable enough to unleash it on the all-important business community.
Whether you see it as a gimmick or not, the user experience definitely benefits from an improved look and feel. It also hides any feeling of sluggishness that can occur when you start running multiple applications at the same time.

The E75 also gets a brand new email client, which has many improvements too – from better push email support (including Nokia’s own push email service that has been set up to compete with BlackBerry), to the ability to view HTML emails within the email client, saving the need to fire up the browser.

You also get an improved level of customisation options for how emails are listed and displayed, which is a real improvement.

Turn around

Unlike handsets with integrated accelerometers, the E75 doesn’t switch screen orientation when you turn the phone on its side, but does so when you slide out the keyboard instead. This makes more sense, although the keyboard doesn’t replicate the soft keys and this presents a problem with a lot of third party applications.

In landscape mode, the Nokia applications will adjust the screen to display the short cuts in the top right and bottom left hand corners. With a third party application, such as Opera Mini, they’ll remain at the bottom – so the bottom left shortcut is pressed with the bottom right hand button and the bottom right softkey with the top right one. Yes, you will get confused and press the wrong buttons repeatedly!

Not that you’ll necessarily want or need to add many applications to the phone. Apple may be proud of having a billion application downloads (even if most are free apps), but even before Nokia launches its new ‘Ovi’ application store, the E75 comes with most of the tools you’ll need. It can manage many attachments, play most audio and video formats, let you edit and create new documents, unzip archives and give turn-by-turn navigation instructions (for an extra cost) with Nokia Maps. You also get an Nseries style media player and gallery, plus the same camera interface used on other models.

Unfortunately, the picture quality from our review model wasn’t as good as with our old E90, showing a much higher level of noise in all but perfect light. Nokia has always argued that imaging isn’t a priority for business users, but it’s still disappointing that the camera isn’t as good as it might have been.

On the left side of the phone is the micro-USB socket, which supports charging, while at the base is the traditional Nokia mini-DC socket for using legacy chargers. Useful for Nokia owners that have accumulated quite a few over the years.

On the right side are volume keys, a camera button that needs a long press to operate, plus a button for voice commands. To prevent accidental operation, the key is flush to the casing and pretty hard to press. 
Your voice can control many aspects of phone usage, while text-to-speech will read out your messages and emails. It’s not a new feature, but reading email is more accurate than it was before, thanks to the use of the new email client.

Rock solid

Eseries models are traditionally very well built, with Nokia knowing that a phone can be responsible for keeping its owner in a job. The E75 feels solid too, but I did notice some light leaking out from the edge of the keyboard. I hope this is nothing to be alarmed about, or just a sign of an early release model, but it’s worth checking out if you get a hands-on look before buying.

Measuring battery performance is always tricky on a smartphone, as the processor will be under varying loads depending on usage, but the 1000mAh battery managed to keep my device powered up for almost 48 hours, even with push email enabled. As always, common sense applies – if you need this for work, charge it every day.

This E75 sits in-between the E71 and E90, but this is a lot nicer to use as an ordinary phone when you’re not entering text. So given the choice (at least until the next Communicator is announced) the E75 is going to take some beating.

VERDICT

Smartphones with slide-out keyboards can vary a great deal in quality and performance, but the E75 takes the highly successful Symbian operating system and puts it in a device that looks great as a normal phone, as well as with the keyboard on view. There are no nasty design quirks and the latest edition of Series 60 gives the phone new features, as well as a much slicker user interface that will appeal to the iPhone generation. It’s packed full of useful business applications, plus multimedia functions. The downside is the average quality camera, but that’s a common problem for all Eseries models.

RATINGS (OUT OF 5)

PERFORMANCE: 4
FEATURES: 4
USABILITY: 5
OVERALL: 4

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Nokia N86 is now avilable in India

As very well said, ‘after a dark night appears twilight’ similar is the case after a long delay the much awaited Nokia N86 8MP is now released in India. Nokia N97of N- series launch has made clear Nokia’s intentions on how it wishes to straddle the high-end segment with its combination of a touchscreen and a camera-phone.

In the 8MP crown mobiles, Nokia N86 will compete with the likes of the Samsung Innov8 and the Sony Ericsson C905. Coincidentally, the Nokia N86 also sports the Series 60 Third Edition Interface equally as Innov8 from Samsung. This device was previously launched internationally in the first week of June byNokia.

The Nokia N86 has an inbuilt memory of 8GB and it can be expanded to 16GB with the help of a compatible MicroSD card. The most influencing feature of the Nokia N86 is the fact that it sports an 8MP camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens – Nokia’s first salvo at the 8MP segment.

3.9 hour talktime with 3G and 6.3 hours whilst on a GSM network is provided by N86. Nokia N86 has a large 2.6-inch QVGA AM OLED (Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode) screen.

In India, the Nokia N86 will be soon available at a dealer near you at just Rs 27,359/- (approx.)

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Nokia’s N97 coming to 3 with free Skype calling – prepay too!

From today, you can pre-order the N97 (in black) on 3 before it goes on sale tomorrow, Friday June 26th.

The phone has all the standard N97 applications, plus Skype with free Skype-to-Skype calling and Instant Messaging.

It will be free of charge on a £35-a-month contract or £320 on prepay – a price that issignficantly cheaper than the SIM-free price of £499 on the Nokia website. Of course, the handset is locked – but 3 is hoping you’ll be happy with its network.

Every prepay top up brings 90 days of free voicemail, a free bundle of texts and 150MB of Internet usage. Contract customers can add unlimited Internet for £5 a month.

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Nokia N97

The Nokia N97 is the latest in the N-series of mobile phone from Nokia that promises the hottest technology combined with a drastically novel form factor. Nokia N97 mobile comes in a brilliant white colour and the most interesting aspect about the whole phone is how the display is situated over the keypad. This New Nokia mobile come with a 5 MP camera and a 32 GB memory, it has a 3.5 inch touch screen along with Symbian OS v 9.4. With a series 60 UI, it should be much better than the Nokia 5800 series. With all the necessary features for tech crazy users like Wi-Fi, 3G support, and also GPS, it’s all set to storm the market and give theiPhone a really tough time.

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Nokia 6208 Classic

Nokia seems to be getting extremely technology innovative these days wit the launch of its first series 40 touchscreen mobile – Nokia 6208 Classic. Though the mobile might look quite average to the normal user, Nokia 6208 Classic a great mobile for those who want to experience the latest in technology for the first time. With a 2.4 inch touch screen, it has a 3.2 MP camera, Bluetooth with A2DP and a MicroSD card support. It is expected to carry an S40 UI as touch screen along with a large stylus. It is also capable of supporting handwriting recognition. Customers will not need to wait longer as it has just been launched here.

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Nokia N95 8GB

Nokia N95 8GB Phone Specifications Dimensions: 99 x 53 x 21 mm, 96 cc Weight : 128 g Internal Memory: 8 GB internal memory SDRAM memory : 128 MB Camera : 5 MP 3D Graphics HW Accelerator Class 32 GPRS, Class 32 EDGE HSCSD, 3G HSDPA Wi-Fi UPnP technology USB v2.0 Nokia N95 8GB Features: Display: 2.8 inches TFT, 16M colours, 240 x 320 pixels Ringtones : Polyphonic, Monophonic, MP3 and True Tones Vibration Alert Accelerometer sensor available for auto-rotation Operating system: Symbian OS 9.2 – S60 rel. 3.1 Messaging: SMS, MMS, Email, Instant Messaging WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML Camera : 5 MP Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus video(VGA 30fps), flash, secondary CIF videocall camera Installed Maps application covering over 100 countries Built-in GPS receiver Dual slide design Java MIDP 2.0 MP3/AAC+/eAAC+/AAC/WMA player TV out FM Radio Office document viewer Organiser Built-in handsfree Push to talk Standard battery, Li-Ion 1200mAH (BL-6F)

Display: The Nokia N95 8GB is an extremely innovative creation of Nokia, which is packed with lots of amazing features. This highly sophisticated mobile device is smart enough to attract your attention and is beautifully crafted with various mesmerising functions. This amazing invention of Nokia comes with a highly attractive TFT screen of 2.8 inches, which appears quite impressive when it displays 16M colours. This large TFT screen gives a nice looks to phone and make it more appealing among the users. This superb mobile gadget is also endowed with an accelerometer sensor for auto-rotation. Carry it comfortably: The Nokia N95 8GB is an highly enticing device which is very sleek and smart. It is a light weighted phone of 128 grams weight and 99 x 53 x 21 mm dimensions. This wonderful gadget with sleek dimensions can comfortably slipped in the pockets and is easy to carry in the hands. Vast storage capacity: The Nokia N95 8GB is embedded with a large internal memory of 8 GB and 128 MB SDRAM memory. This large memory allows the users to store a vast amount of entries, data and information in the form of images, wallpapers, videos, songs etc. Superb quality camera: The Nokia N95 8GB is furnished with a high quality camera of 5 mega pixels, which lets the users to capture quality images of various memorable moments. This superior quality camera is also packed with modern camera features such as autofocus, good quality flash and Carl Zeiss optics. It also comprises of a secondary CIF videocall camera. You can enjoy the real pleasure of photography with the great quality camera of this majestic mobile device.

Connectivity applications: The Nokia N95 8GB provide the users extremely great quality connectivity facilities such as GPRS, EDGE, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and USB facilities. These fantastic data sharing facilities let the users to share their useful files and documents and also allow them to exchange songs and wallpapers with each other. Nothing can be the best way other than this, to be connected with the whole world. Symbian Operating System : This Nokia’s innovative creation is also furnished with advanced Symbian operating system. The users can perform various multimedia tasks easily with the help of this operating system and its useful applications make their work more easy and simple. Excellent Music: The Nokia N95 8GB comes with an excellent quality MP3/AAC/AAC+/eAAC+/WMA player and a high quality stereo FM radio. These highly amazing entertaining features let the users to listen to their favourite songs any time and offer them an extremely amazing musical experience, which is highly refreshing and pampering. Voice dial/memo feature:

The Nokia N95 8GB is well embedded with an outstanding feature called vice memo, which is very exciting and useful. This fantastic feature let the users to record various phone calls and voices of their friends and close ones. When ever you feel lonely you can listen to the voice of your close ones and this will gives you an intense feeling that they are very near to you.

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Nokia 5800 Review

Even though it’s branded with Carl Zeiss optics, the camera module equipped on the 5800 is slightly above average at best. It takes great pictures in adequate sunlight but fails miserably in low light conditions. The lack of a proper xenon flash makes things worse (the dual LED light included isn’t much help, really). Pictures are washed out and extremely noisy on the default automatic settings in low light (blame the tiny sensor), and the auto White Balance is a little off most of the time even with sufficient light.

Quite simply put, the advanced post-processing algorithms found in the N95/N73/ (insert your N-series here are) are just not there. We do not know if this is by design or otherwise, but we suspect that Nokia didn’t want their mid-tier performer to eat up into the sales of their more Camera-oriented, higher placed offerings.

The video side of the camera is also equally above average, being capable of recording 640X480 30FPS movies (or 640X352 for widescreen fans) for as long as you would want (and as long as the SD card can hold) in MP4 format. The video quality itself is a bit on the noisy side as well.

Bottom line, as a daily performer the camera’s fine; just don’t expect miracles from it.

Or use it at night.

As an XpressMusic mobile, one would expect the music playing capabilities of the 5800 to be up to par – and on this front it generally delivers. Capable of playing most of the more common audio file format (MP3/WMA/WAV/eAAC+/AAC), the audio player interface is again standard S60 fare, slightly optimised for touch navigation. Most of the normal niceties of a modern mobile-based music player are present (playlist creation, sorting by genre/artist/name, album art display, and customizable equaliser presets); although the album art display implementation is a bit messed up and requires some extensive user intervention.

The bundled headphones were not bad as earbuds go (surprisingly), but I’m an in-ear person so I quickly substituted if for my old Sony Ericcson HPM-70s earbuds – which was easy as the bundled HS-41 controller had a dandy 3.5’ jack.

And then there are the stereo speakers, which are loud, clear and remarkably bassy for its size; albeit with slightly quirky positioning (along the left side / bottom while in landscape mode). Nokia’s justification for this seems to be the fact that bouncing the speaker output on any hard surface will increase the apparent volume of the speaker. The only problem with this reasoning is that the 5800 won’t be put on a hard surface ALL the time.

In terms of sound quality (through headphones), the 5800 does quite well, being amongst the best of Nokia’s current offerings (as per tests at Mobile-Burn.com and Mobile-Review.com), although it can’t match the Samsung Innov8’s superior sound quality. Having hardware decoding does make it slightly more superior to competitors that rely on software decoding of audio files, and to my relatively untrained ears it sounds excellent, provided that you are game on playing around with the EQ settings.

With its’ gorgeous screen, one would expect that it would do well as a mobile Video player. This it does, despite the limited video format support (Xvid or H264 MP4, WMV, RM, 3GP – no native AVI/MKV support here folks). It plays video files converted to its’ full screen resolution (640×360, Xvid, 23FPS, Superb quality VBR setting) smoothly enough, probably due to the integrated co-processor handling Video encoding and decoding. Other than this, the player is very spartan at best, not even having playlist support of any kind (bad, Nokia, bad).

Next, would be the storage media provided and Nokia is absolutely spot on here by providing, right in the box, a 8GB Class-6 microSD card. For its price point, that in itself is a killer selling point right there, with other makers opting for puny 2GB or 4GB memory cards for similarly priced music oriented phones.

On the gaming side, the bundled games are playable, if not a little laggy. The touchscreen opens up a huge new opportunity for S60 developers though, something that I would want to cover in detail later in a more extensive article.

Now, if there’s one main problem with the 5800 that I cannot overlook, it’s the fact that it LACKS ANY HARDWARE PLAYBACK BUTTONS OF ANY KIND. Sorry, but I cannot stress how much a problem this is. Yes, the 5800 has a full touch interface, but is that reason to skimp on the hardware buttons? Imagine what will happen when you ditch the bundled headphones AND the controller for your shiny audiophile headphones, you WILL have to bring it out of your pocket to change songs and this is simply unacceptable in some situations.

Adding a play/pause button and remapping a long hold of the volume buttons to track change would have been a good solution to this issue (ala the old Sony Ericsson Walkmans), the latter of which COULD still be implemented through a firmware update.

THREE MONTHS LATER: The V20 firmware update added Geotagging, which is awesome. General image quality in light deprived areas are still bad though, seems V21 will take care of that. On the music front, new third party IEMs are sounding great on the 5800, but are making general deficiencies with the default EQ more apparent (the general flatness and lack of bass). EQed to compensate, but using a third party IEM is making the lack of hardware playback buttons even more apparent.

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