We've been hearing about the 5800 XpressMusic for quite some time now, and today it was finally unveiled at a Nokia event in London. If you are a devoted Nokia fan, reluctant to explore the wonders of touch interfaces in competing camps, the 5800 XpressMusic phone (specs) may save your day this holiday season.
Nokia executives have admitted that there is nothing better than getting a hard kick in the ass once in a while. Without Steve Jobs and Apple's wake-up call to the industry, and Nokia in particular (since the hottest multimedia phones have often been Nokia branded in the past), who knows what would be coming out of Nokia today other than yet another re-incarnation of something we had already seen before.
The 5800 XpressMusic is however not targeting the high-end market like the Apple iPhone 3G, but primarily aims to reach the youth markets in Europe and Asia when it's released sometime in Q4 2008. A version supporting AT&T Wireless' HSDPA network will also be released, though price and exact availability has not been announced.
Since the 5800 is powered by Symbian S60 5th edition, it sports a browser capable of streaming Flash video (like the videos you're watching on this site or YouTube), including H.264, On2 VP6 and Sorenson video codecs. The specific plug-in enabling this browser feature, the new Adobe Flash Lite 3, also offers an external API for browser scripting, and promises up to 20% improvement in ActionScript performance and up to 30% improvement in rendering performance compared to Adobe Flash Lite 2.
They key to Adobe Flash Lite 3, however, is the amount of free RAM. While the minimum requirement is only 128KB, a typical video review here at infoSync is 8-10 MB in size with a duration of a couple of minutes. If you're going to watch a 10-minute video with good image quality, you won't get far without a significant amount of free RAM on your phone. The Nokia 5800 offers 128MB SDRAM and 256MB Flash ROM, which equals what's found in the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet.
The 5800 will come with a bundled 8GB microSD card for storage of up to 6000 tracks and will support all the mainstream digital music formats. It uses a 3.5mm jack for headphones. Nokia claims the built-in surround stereo speakers to offer the industry's most powerful sound. More interestingly, the 5800 will be offered with the Comes with Music service, which is due to be launched for the 5800 early next year. This service lets users download music for free the first 12 months after buying the phone.
Taking advantage of touch screen technology, the 5800 XpressMusic introduces the "Media Bar", a drop down menu that provides direct access to music and entertainment, including favorite tracks, videos and photos. A new "Contacts Bar" lets consumers highlight four favorite contacts on their home-screen and, through a single touch, track a digital history of recent text messages, e-mail, phone logs, photos and blog updates.
The 5800 features a 3.2" widescreen display (640 x 360 pixels), 3.2-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss lens (photos and VGA videos can be shared with a single touch), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, Nokia Maps and a software QWERTY thumbboard. A pen stylus can also be used along with handwriting recognition applications, and a plectrum should come in handy for music aficionados. Additionally, the 5800 incorporates an accelerometer for display rotation.
The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic will be available worldwide beginning in the fourth quarter of 2008 for an estimated retail price of 279 EUR before subsidies.
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