Relatively fresh from the purchase of an Omnia smartphone just 3 months previously, I felt I had enough of an education in high-end phones in general and touch-screen phones in particular to be able to tell whether a cellphone had some enterprising and iinovative stuff to offer a common cellphone consumer. Thus once I got my hands on Nokia’s 5800 XpressMusic and browsed through some of its capabilities, I could immediately tell that this phone was going to be a hit, regardless of the many negative nitpicks you could skim off the net regarding its features.

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, commonly nicknamed the “Tube”, is Nokia’s first Symbian S60 “full-touch” device. This distinction is important, as Nokia already has the 7700 covering its cellphone line, with the N810 covering the net-enabled browsing category. The Tube is positioned as a music phone in the mid-range phone category, and Nokia’s implementation of touch-screen control is perfectly in line with their overall plan of releasing multiple touch-screen cellphones to cover all market points, similar to how AMD/ATI released a mid-range offering centered around a capable core GPU and expanding from there. Hence, the S60 UI touch implementation has a number of compromises that render it less streamlined than an equivalent single-platform touch screen phone. We will cover this in later paragraphs – for now let’s take a look at the phone itself.

The top part of the 5800.

The right side of the device islined with volume, lock, and camera buttons.

The Tube is named so due to its long-rectangular and curved-bottom shape; a shape that’s pleasing in the hand but not so pleasing inside a tight jeans pocket. Nonetheless, its relative heft (109g) and thickness around its waist (15.5mm) is a refreshing change from the typical touch-screen shape (slim but seemingly fragile). It’s hefty, but not in a bad way. Following usual Nokia convention, there’s a lot of black plastic about, it is accentuated a bit by a red, shiny band on the periphery of the phone, right before the fingerprint-style backplate. All sides are lined by buttons, none of which are too intrusive or jarring to the eye.

This speaker grille has its twin at the other end of the device, giving stereo sound output.

There's a lot of screen space for easy to activate buttons, especially in landscape mode.

From the top, we have the mini USB connector (yey!) that’s covered by a neat rubber flap, a 3.5” mini output jack that’s left uncovered (hmm), the charging socket, and the power button. The left side hosts both the SIM-slot and the micro-SD slot, covered by hard plastic flaps with a rubbery hinge that seems somewhat delicate (careful not to pull too hard). The right side is a little busier, with the volume buttons, a slider-lock that feels quite robust, and the camera button. A little below the left side flaps for SIM and micro-SD are the cool-looking speaker grilles. The 5800’s face is 90% screen – a 3.2” resistive affair that’s not too glossy, in a 16:9 aspect ratio and boasting of a 640 x 360 resolution. There’s the small pinhole camera to the right-top of the device, the media-bar button below it, and three buttons at the bottom: Call, End and “Menu” button, what’s now called the “App Launcher”. The backplate holds the plasticky stylus, and the 3.2MP Carl Zeiss lens camera and a dual-LED flash peeks out at top right of the device.

The Carl Zeiss lens - equipped camera takes very good pics on par with the N95's

First stop in the feature department: the touch screen. This resistive touch screen works suffers from legibility issues under sunlight, something that usually can’t be said of capacitive screens such as that of the iPhone’s. However, pointers other than your finger can be used with a resistive touch screen, making it more versatile than capacitive screens. The 5800’s actual screen resides behind the resistive films, so it should stand up better to general wear and tear and be more resistant to scratches. The camera is a stand-up affair – capturing clean, bright pictures in good light, you wouldn’t think this was only a 3.2MP jobber. The usual enhancements and post-processing options found in all recent Nokia cameras are also found here. Focusing is quite fast, right up there with the LG Renoir, which has one of the fastest auto-focus systems on the market. Lag between picture taking and display is negligible; saving your pictures is quick too. The 5800 can also record VGA video at 30fps.

The media button gives quick access to all media types.

There is no flick-scrolling through media items, the side-scroll bar must be used.

Now on to the internal features: the 5800 is a quad-band phone with GSM, 3G and HSDPA support. Some other extras include GPS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. The 5800 is able to play music at very high (for a cellphone) volumes, though quality is so-so. Plug in a decent set of earphones however, and you get some great tunes, there’s definitely an above-average DAP inside the device somewhere. Some notable experiences in regards to this cellphone is its YouTube (streaming video) performance – it seems like Nokia set the device to sacrifice quality for speed; in a standard Wi-Fi hotspot, there’s only a few dropped frames and loading the video itself is hardly a problem; but when using 3G or similar, even the compromise of speed over quality doesn’t pay enough dividends to be able to watch streaming video properly.

Browsing on the 5800 is a no-hassle affair, putting aside network speed, the 5800 is generally snappy when dragging around the screen, and double-clicking to magnify is faster than the Omnia. It is served well by the implementation of the media access button and the choice of two “home” screens. Media handling is quite good, in that it is relatively easy to find the content you want, and the basic phone activities of calling and texting deserves no special mention. So what’s with the half-baked descriptions of the 5800’s usability? The problem arises from the feeling that the 5800 lacks a little bit of consistency, as single-tap, double-taps, finger-scrolling from the center of the screen and scrolling using a side-scroll button, are all commands mixed up in the different menus and screen available on the 5800. Internet browsing can handle center-screen scrolling, while browsing through contacts must be accomplished by the side-scroll button.

Both guitar pick and plastic stylus stand ready to serve your pointing needs.

In other words, this is definitely not a seamless experience, but this can be explained as the intricacies of adapting a regular S60 UI initially used on non-touch-screen cell phones. Also remember, the 5800 is only the first of many touch screen phones that will be released by Nokia – we will perhaps be seeing more of this interface, in improved guise, over the following months.

Included accessories. A stand, ahnds-free kit,earphones, and TV-out cable set.

At a low, low price of P19900, Nokia’s newest device will certainly appeal to nearly everyone, and anyone who’s looking for a bargain. Yes, even with my nitpicks on the user interface and a little bit of disappointment regarding the polish on the touch screen implementation, this is one phone I’d heartily recommend – all its functionality and its Symbian UI in a touch screen form factor, mixed with its irresistible price, is sorely tempting. I’m just hoping I can get a firmware upgrade sometime soon, to further improve on its touch screen interface.