In our in-depth Nokia 5310 review, Philip Berne lets you know exactly why this is one of Nokia's best cell phones to date.
Review summary of the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic:
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 The Nokia 5310 XpressMusic is a music phone that makes us happy for a number of reasons. This isn't an iPhone competitor, which makes sense, considering the low, $50 price tag. But it is far better than most other so-called music phones on the market, and includes many features that should set the standard. We like the 3.5mm headphone jack, the included 1GB memory card, and the two-stage stereo headphones a microphone. We also liked this phone for regular calling, and found call quality and even its messaging capabilities were surprisingly good. There are phones at four times this price that don't have all these features, and though the phone lacks 3G networking and the accompanying services, when we focused simply on the music abilities, we were happy with what we heard. Release: May 2008. Price: $1.
Pros: Slim design keeps the dedicated music keys, adds a 3.5mm headphone jack. Surprisingly robust messaging clients.
Cons: No 3G networking means slow Web browsing, no advanced services. Transfer software needs a serious update to bring it in line with iTunes.
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Full Nokia 5310 XpressMusic Review:
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Design - Very good
It's easy to pick out what we like best about the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic phone. When we press the play button on the side of the phone, music starts playing. It's just that simple. This is a phone that takes music seriously, and the design speaks to that function. The Nokia 5310 updates the older Nokia 5300 with some better design choices. First, it's a much slimmer phone, though it loses the Nokia 5300's fun, rubbery feel. This phone also has a 3.5mm headphone jack on top. It's well-placed, and we can't say how much we appreciate being able to use our own headphones. We would have liked an external memory slot, but even though the slot is under the battery cover, we didn't have to remove the battery to replace the 1GB card included in the retail box.
The interface is standard Nokia S40, but it somehow doesn't look right on this phone. It isn't the screen; the 2-inch, QVGA screen is bright and rich with 16-million possible colors. Text looks great, as do pictures, including Web site images. But the icons on the main menu look a bit blocky and jagged. Perhaps this is just a sign that the S40 interface needs some refreshing, and certainly an intrepid user will find replacement themes.
Calling - Very good
Calls on the Nokia 5310 sounded very good, even though we didn't have much luck with reception. We mostly saw a single bar on T-Mobile's network in New York City, and even EDGE reception was hard to find. During calls, our friends said we sounded clean and clear, and we even liked the somewhat bright quality we heard on our end. There was some audible noise from the time the call starts, but it wasn't so bad we had to talk over it, even while speaking in low tones.
The phone has some nice calling features as well. The speakerphone is very, very loud. Clearly meant for music playback, we easily managed to disturb our cubicle neighbors, which is a good thing. Voice dialing was definitely better on the Nokia 5310 than it was on the Nokia 5300, as the latter phone couldn't understand a single command. On the Nokia 5310, the voice dialing took us through a training session first, then managed to get our commands mostly right. Not perfect, but about four out of five times it was correct. Conference calling required more menu drilling than we liked, and we wish the Talk key would join two calls when pressed, instead of swapping between the two.
Messaging - Very good
The Nokia 5310 happily surprised us with its wealth of messaging options. SMS and MMS messaging were obvious features, and both worked well on this phone. We especially liked the phone's keypad. The humped keys were easy to find by touch, and though the entire phone is somewhat narrow, tapping out messages was easier than we expected. We were surprised to find a robust selection of IM and e-mail clients. Though they weren't especially good looking or feature rich, both the IM and e-mail apps came with plenty of preloaded clients. These included AOL, MSN, Yahoo and ICQ for instant messaging and a host of e-mail providers, including Apple's .Mac service and Verizon's ISP e-mail service. Of course, these are simple POP accounts, but we've seen many phones that lack even Gmail support built-in, let alone support for major competitors. We'd like to see Gtalk or Jabber make it's way to IM clients, but this is still a rarity.
Music - Very good
This is decidedly a music phone, and as we mentioned earlier, its design completely supports this function. We liked the dedicated playback controls, which let us shuttle through individual songs and skip whole tracks. We also can't say enough to encourage other manufacturers to include a 3.5mm headphone jack, especially on music-minded phones, as this is one of the better design upgrades since the Nokia 5300. The microSDHC slot supports cards up to 4GB (though we've read forum posts that suggest an 8GB card might work), and we were happy to find T-Mobile included a 1GB card, which should be enough for a day's worth of music.
The phone doesn't come with any music transfer software, which is odd, because the Nokia PC Suite is available as a free download anyway. The PC Suite includes the Nokia Music Manager, which has certainly been improved since we used it with the Nokia 5300 more than a year ago, but not so much that it will present a challenge to iTunes. This is the weak link in the Nokia XpressMusic chain, and Nokia needs to build a synchronization suite that is unified, intuitive and automatic. The software doesn't support Macs, but the phone can be used in USB disk mode, which let us drag files from our Macbook to the Music folder on the phone's microSD card.
The music player on the phone itself is fine, but could also use some improvement. It has some nice features, including a fairly easy playlist creation manager as well as a customizable EQ. Album artwork is available, though tiny, but we would have liked to see a more polished, flowing interface. Forget Apple's iPhone music player, Nokia should look to Sony and their excellent Walkman software for their phones, like the W580 on AT&T. Still, the low-end player didn't affect the phone's sound quality, which was very good. Even from the built-in speaker, which we found to be impressively loud, music was quite enjoyable.
Accessories - Very good
Kudos to Nokia and T-Mobile for including everything we needed to get started with this music phone. While many carriers refuse to bundle even a pair of stereo headphones, Nokia includes a pair of earbuds as well as a separate microphone with a 3.5mm jack, so you can plug your own cans into the microphone to make calls. The phone uses the newer microUSB port and includes a cable, but the best addition is the 1GB microSD card. You may want a larger card, but many users will be happy with a gigabyte and will never need to replace it. With all these accessories, we were surprised that transfer software wasn't included on a disk, but as we said, the Nokia Music Manager is a free download.
Odds and ends
Beyond the music features, the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic also features a 2-megapixel camera, as well as a Web browser. It might be telling that Nokia doesn't include a dedicate camera button, and instead the camera feature is buried under three menu layers. But pictures were actually not bad. We saw some good detail, and though photos were fairly blurry overall, in good light our pics were usable. Not printable, though the phone can connect directly to a printer, but usable for emergency shots.
The Web browser was pretty poor, which is disappointing, because Nokia is a leader in Web browsing phones with their N-series devices. The browser was very slow to load our page, and the layout was beyond messy. Pictures were cut off half-way as they ran into text boxes, and the entire page was a jumble. Images that loaded correctly looked very sharp on the phone's great screen, but the rest of the Web browsing experience was unpleasant.
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