Review : Nokia 5800

Here it is, Nokia’s own competitor to the successful iPhone, and its very first phone that has the brand new “Comes with Music” service, allowing owners to download music (with digital rights management) for one year. But now, it faces our editors to see if it lives up to the hype. Will it succeed, or has become a costly mistake from Nokia?

Once we got the phone, we didn’t care for the design or the software or even the looks until after we tested out the new Comes with Music service, and it features many tracks from all four record labels. It is laced with DRM, but it is free – though Nokia is cautious on calling it “free”. However, since it is heavily dependant on your mobile cap, we suggest that you download it via Wi-Fi, or download it via PC and then transfer it to the headset.

Now we go straight back to the looks; and the phone looks sleek – though it is fatter than the iPhone. Other than then obvious comparisons, like the touchscreen, there are buttons on the side for direct access to the camera, a volume rocker and the three buttons at the front. It also has a touch button, allowing you quick access to the media keys.

The operating system and the touch screen work together, but the review model was a bit slow in loading the menus. The keys can be, however, too small – so this is where the stylus comes in. It also gives a bit of feedback, and you have to “press” into the button – something different to the iPhone, where it is touch sensitive. The phone also has a switch where you can lock the phone, which is good since you don’t want stuff inside your pocket touch the screen of the phone and call someone.

It also has a 3.5mm headphone jack, which is something that our last phone review, the Sony Ericsson C510, did not feature. It also has a 3.2 megapixel camera featuring a Carl Zeiss lens. The camera is excellent, and the flash is pretty powerful. The phone also has another VGA camera at the front, so you can call people via video.

Browsing on the phone is pretty, and we can admit it, crap. It is very, very slow to load pages, and the keys do make it a tad complicated to view something. While we do like the phone as a whole, it just this seems to be a weak link. Also, our review phone took 2 – 3 minutes to just load up the music store’s front page.

Battery life for Talk Time is pretty low compared to other phones; but standby time has 408 hours – not a lot of difference, but is certainly high, and allows you to listen or watch your media files on the phone without running your battery dry for a day.

Overall, the phone is pretty decent. The multimedia features do put a punch to the iPhone, but not a lot of damage. Web browsing is not one of its strong points (and we wouldn’t recommend the phone for that), but I think the free music might be the one that seals the deal, along with its new Ovi service – which is set to combine a lot of Nokia’s mobile services into one single brand, and this includes an Application store.

I would certainly, however, would recommend the phone just for the free music – but make sure you have a data plan that would allow you to have the capacity to download your music (and podcasts, because it does support them).

I do apologise for the very short review, we only had about a week to review it and because of the timetable conflicts, we had to rush a bit of the review.