Nokia 5800

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic also known as ‘The Tube’ comes with some engaging features such as the restrictive touchscreen which houses an option for handwriting recognition and has been a long awaited competitor to other touchscreens such as th iPhone.

Complete with a little guitar type pick to use in correlation to the screen. This can be either slid into the phone or worm around your wrist. Of course the purist can still use the tap on the screen with fingers method with great effect, and what is great with this is that the touchscreen is not too overly sensitive so cuts out those little mistakes made by slips of the fingers.

The rather impressive large 640 x 360 LCD screen is easy to manage and has some rather nice color for what is not and overly glossy screen, which is an advantage if you hate glare and love to watch movies. All put together in a neat looking slimline shell.

The sound from the large rear speaker is good quality unlike the touchscreen cells made by Palm; namely the now outdated ‘Centro’ or the newer Palm ‘Pre’. Added to this the speaker located on the rear of the cell is loud, what more do you want from a cell phone with XpressMusic within its title?

Also a must nowadays with a cell phone is the ability to take and share photographs which the Nokia 5800 has a 3.2 megapixel camera with a great LED flash, the camera takes some good quality sharp images outdoors but remember you will need to use the flash inside your house as with most cell cameras.

Touch and drag scrolling is a feature if the touchscreen which helps resolve those fly away text moments that you seem to get on some other hand sets. One thing though is getting used too double clicks and single clicks, but once mastered is not so much if a nuisance, but the other features of this phone well and truly make up for any inconsistencies such as double clicking.

Among the user friendly S60 5.0v software housed in this neat cell phone are the usual suspects Wifi, GPRS, and a free 8GB microSD card which fits snuggly into the side of the phone. An impressive feature of the software is the little button above the screen that when touched activates a drop down menu from which you can select the type of media experience you wish to have at a given moment. The Media Bars give you the options of the browser and sharing, movies, music and photos.

Altogether the whole package in the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic bundle is pretty impressive and about time that Nokia developed a decent touchscreen phone which is packed with user friendly features., large icons, onscreen QWERTY keyboard, great looking video and graphics capability for the gamer and movie enthusiasts. It will quite easily stand up to anything in a similar price range from Palm or iPhone.

One thing that Nokia did forget is the whole shake your screen and make great effects application, but it was not missed.