Product Listing

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic - A Commitment to Music

By Seow Tein Hee - 25 Feb 2009

Design

Touch Me, Hold Me

On first appearances with 5800 XpressMusic, you're bound to notice the generous display size of the phone. As its specifications indicate, the 5800 XpressMusic comes with a 3.2-inch screen that's optimized for touch screen navigation. And yes, we adore the 3.2-inch screen, for many reasons. One, it gives you more room to navigate through the various icons on the user interface. Two, watching videos will be a breeze on the expansive 3.2-inch screen that comes with an accelerometer for landscape viewing.

The 3.2-inch screen, with a 16:9 aspect ratio, gives you a wide-screen experience for your movies on landscape mode.

The 5800 XpressMusic's design comes in a minimalist form, i.e. less is better. As such, the only obvious buttons you'll see on the outlook are the Call/End buttons flanking the Menu button at the bottom of the device. Flip over to the sides, and you'll notice two covers for both the microSD and SIM card slot. Now here's our biggest grouse with the device: the SIM card slot. On the surface, it seems as though inserting the SIM card is pretty easy: open, insert, and close. Yes, that is pretty easy when it come to insertion. Now, extraction of the SIM card is another ball game. Try as we might, we couldn't eject the SIM card out and wondered if there is even a spring mechanism involved to eject it as is the norm for such designs. Sadly, there isn't. Once we opened up the battery casing, we spotted a quick instruction on SIM card extraction. Essentially, you need to remove the battery, take out the stylus, and insert it into a groove within the device to push the SIM card out.

You can insert the SIM card in easily, but extracting it requires a whole load of work such as pushing the SIM card out with the stylus. On the same track, you'll need more effort to eject the microSD card out from the spring loaded slot.

Speaking of the battery casing, we do need to highlight an observation of ours. In our attempts to remove the SIM card, we also noticed that prying the battery casing open requires some force on the user's end. Unfortunately, the build quality of the 5800 XpressMusic's battery casing is not something to shout about, and during our daily handling, we actually dented one of the plastic tabs. In doing so, we were unable to insert the stylus back to its holder properly until we forcefully twisted the tab back into place. So much for ease of usage and quite unlike a Nokia device.

Besides the difficulty in prying open the battery casing, we noticed that there's a little catch (highlighted in red) that is easily bent, thus possibly blocking the stylus from being fully inserted until rectified back.

What we did admire about the device, is the dedicated key guard slider on the right profile. Positioned at the centre right side of the device, it felt very natural and smooth when we slid our thumb onto the slider and locked the device. However, the volume buttons are a little too flushed for our liking, but given for a fact that you can adjust the volume via its touchscreen display, we'll give this a miss.

Whether it's a touchscreen device or not, having a dedicated keyguard button (or slider in this case) will do wonders to your user experience (such as less accidental phone calls).

If an XpressMusic device doesn't come with a 3.5mm audio jack, we would be at a loss for words. Thankfully we weren't disappointed and the 5800 XpressMusic's 3.5mm audio jack is located at the crown of the device. In this spot, it shares the same real estate space with the power button, charging port and microUSB port. Now, if you think about this, with the microUSB port at the top of the device, you can connect it to your PC, yet have the device aligned straight to your sight without wires bent. We've seen this design aspect in some recent Nokia devices, and truth is, we do like that.

From left to right: Power button, charging port, 3.5mm audio jack, microUSB port.

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