We check out Nokia's new unlocked touchscreen phone. Can Nokia's touch interface hang with the big boys? Find out in our Nokia 5800 review.
Review summary of the Nokia 5800:
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 Besides some quirks and strange choices, the Nokia 5800 is actually a nice phone. Calls sounded good, and battery life was strong. The phone has solid music, video, Web browsing and GPS features, and even though none of these are exceptional, they're all robust and quite capable compared to other multimedia phones out there. On the other hand, we had hoped to see a more polished interface design, better camera and an overall multimedia performance that could match the N series smartphones, but it seems like we'll have to wait and see if the Nokia N97 can work some real magic there. In our opinion, Nokia also needs some new ideas about finger controls. Attaching two different styli to the phone just won't cut it, especially when remembering that Windows phones with only one stylus attached are already in trouble. Release: March 2009. Price: $320.
Pros: Music sounds good. Microsoft Exchange support for e-mail, contacts and calendar. Solid Web browser. Responsive touchscreen.
Cons: Mediocre camera performance. Too many hardcoded onscreen keyboard options. S60 5th Edition doesn't provide the real XpressMusic experience.
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Full Nokia 5800 Review:
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Design – Good
Of course the most interesting aspect of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic's design is the new touch interface. Though Nokia has certainly made touchscreen devices before, the Nokia 5800 is the first device to come along in the wake of the recent tablet phone revolution. We were expecting to find touch capabilities shoehorned into a standard Symbian S60 platform, but in reality the phone's interface is actually kind of pleasant. It isn't the marvel of design that the Apple iPhone OS represents, but it's certainly more pleasant than using Windows Mobile on an all-touch device, even the Samsung Omnia, with it's TouchWIZ interface.
There are some problems that make the S60 5th Edition platform seem less than polished. Pressing the Menu key takes you to the last open menu, not the main menu. The screen orientation switch from portrait to landscape could be slow, some times taking up to 5 seconds. Scrolling lists on the Nokia 5800 is different than on other all-touch phones. You don't move the list with you finger, instead you move a selector up and down. It still worked nicely, and the screen was pleasantly responsive, but we wished that scrolling would accelerate as we moved through our music library or our contacts. Instead, scrolling actually slowed down near the end, which was very annoying.
Overall, 5th Edition offers a nice implementation of touch sensitivity on Symbian S60, but it's not a great touch interface in its own right. Nokia even concedes that you'll need a stylus, so they bundle two different pointed with the device. A guitar pick can hang off the phone on a cord, or you can use the stylus slotted in the battery cover around back. We almost wish Nokia would start from scratch and create a whole new platform designed for touch, perhaps using capacitative touchscreens instead of the resistive technology on the Nokia 5800.
The Nokia 5800 is one of the least attractive all-touch phones we've seen, but it's still a functional design. The phone is squat and thick with a protruding rim around the edge of the device. We like the external slots for not only the microSD card, but for the SIM card as well, though the SIM slot wasn't spring loaded, so it was easy to insert but not remove.
For buttons, the phone gets a camera button, volume rocker and a dedicated, touch sensitive, media menu key that lets you jump to music, photos, etc. When the screen goes black, you light it up by flicking the lock switch. Easy enough, but why not just rely on the built-in proximity sensor, like Apple's iPhone 3G does? The Nokia 5800 is already smart enough to black the screen during calls.
Calling - Good
Calls on our Nokia 5800 review unit sounded pretty good. We used AT&T's 3G network for our tests, and calls were mostly clean. We heard a slight bit of hiss at times, and callers reported a somewhat metallic quality to our voices, but nothing too serious. Reception was solid throughout our test time. We were also impressed with battery life. We got nearly 6 hour of talk time, which is pretty good for an HSDPA network. But we like that the phone seemed to sip juice slowly on standby, so after leaving the phone for a couple days without using it, it still had plenty of life left.
Thanks to Symbian OS, the Nokia 5800 has a capable address book. We used the included Mail for Exchange app to synchronize our Outlook contacts with the phone. The phone also lets you place shortcuts for 4 contacts on the home screen, which was nice, but we could double that and still beg for more. Searching through the contact list was strange though, as an alphabetically arranged, not QWERTY, keyboard appeared. The keyboard only places 18 lettes or numbers on screen at once, so typing for instance the letter "R" would require you to go the next page.
For calling features, the Nokia 5800 is a mixed bag. The speakerphone is great. It was very loud and clear. Conference calling was also easy. Once you've placed your second call, an icon appears to conference the two calls. We connected 4 calls at once and had no trouble swapping and dropping individuals from the conference. The Nokia 5800 comes with speaker independent voice dialing, but it suffers from the Nokia curse. We simply wish Nokia would have included its new voice control by Nuance on this phone.
Messaging - Good
Messaging on the Nokia 5800 was solid, though it did lack some essential features. Text messaging was easy enough with the wide onscreen QWERTY keyboard. We liked the haptic feedback on the keyboard, which gave us a soft click every time we successfully pressed a key. There are more compact keyboard options available, especially for portrait mode, but when we stuck to the wider landscape keyboard we were much happier. The phone has predictive input, so it will guess what you want to say, but we wish it would correct our mistakes, instead. That's a much more useful feature on a touchscreen phone.
All around, the various keyboards on the Nokia 5800 were unpredictable and made little sense. In some apps, we'd get a full screen QWERTY, while in others (like GPS navigation), we'd only have a tiny mini-QWERTY, or a number pad. In the contacts list, it's that strange alphabetic, multi-page layout. Worst of all, there's often no way to pick your favorite. Nokia needs to standardize this throughout the UI.
For e-mail, we used the included e-mail app to connect to Gmail. Then, we used the Mail for Exchange program to synchronize with our Microsoft Exchange accounts. Having Exchange access on a multimedia phone like this is a great plus that makes it much more useful, not only for e-mail, but for scheduling and contacts as well. We also like that whenever we wanted to send a message, from the photo viewer or from the address book, the phone always gave us the option to choose which account to use.
The one major feature the Nokia 5800 lacks is Instant Messaging. Again, Nokia has never been good about bundling IM apps on their unlocked phones. Of course, since it is a Symbian device, there are plenty of third party apps available, but we always prefer when this feature comes preloaded.
Music - Good
The Nokia 5800 has music in its name, but music doesn't seem to be its primary focus, especially considering the other phones in the XpressMusic family that we've liked (to check out our comparison of Nokia's XpressMusic phones, click here). Don't get us wrong. The Nokia 5800 does have some nice music features. For one thing, music sounded great on this phone. Even played through the onboard speakers, sound quality was good overall, and we liked the equalizer and stereo widening options. The phone also uses a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, so we could use our own earbuds. An 8GB microSD card comes preloaded.
Music transfer was a real chore though. This time around, we eschewed the standard PC Studio and let Nokia's Ovi software manage the sync tasks. The interface was still confusing, slow and uninspired. Music transfer took a long time, much longer than we had expected.
Web Browsing - Good
While the Nokia 5800 uses the capable Nokia Web browser, which uses WebKit technology, the interface was pretty basic and unfriendly. The mini map from other Nokia phones is still there, and you drag it around with your finger, but we wish the mini map would magnify the small portion it covers, like the browser on the T-Mobile G1. The browser window also needs to react better to touch. It was responsive for panning and scrolling, but zooming and clicking on links were more of a pain. The phone didn't always resize properly when we tapped to zoom in, and some links were unresponsive until we pulled out one of the two different styli included with the phone.
We have to give the Nokia browser some credit for using Flash Lite 3. It did slow things down considerably, but with some patience and a little luck, YouTube videos played nicely. Videos were playable either in their respective Web page, or in full screen mode. Often a long or slow-loading video would freeze the browser, but about half the time videos played smoothly.
Camera - Mediocre
The phone uses a 3-megapixel, auto focus shooter, and Nokia is certainly capable of turning out some excellent cameraphones. But pictures on the Nokia 5800 were horrible. They were blurry with lots of noise. Colors were drab and insipid. The dual LED flash helped with lighting, but pictures taken with the flash came out even blurrier than shots without.
Chocolate Display
Row of Pineapples
Pineapple Close-Up
Habaneros
Self Portrait with flash
Self Portrait without flash
Photo management also needs some serious improvement. Most touchscreen phones, including HTC's TouchFLO phones like the HTC Touch Pro, use gesture controls to zoom or rotate photos. On the Nokia 5800, you can swipe photos to see the next one, but most photo viewing is handled by onscreen menus. To zoom, you have to move a slider bar with your finger, then watch the spinning icon onscreen while the phone redraws. It's neither smooth nor fun to use. Photo uploading was very easy, and we paired the Nokia 5800 with our Flickr account in no time.
GPS Navigation - Good
For GPS navigation, the Nokia 5800 comes with Nokia Maps. We were impressed with the GPS performance on this phone, and also with the fluidity of the Nokia Maps program. It was fun to start at a full Earth view and zoom in quickly to our exact location. It's not Google Earth, but its better than most phone navigation programs. We had problems entering destinations for turn by turn navigation, as the phone wouldn't let us use the widescreen keyboard layout. But once we typed in an address, the phone helped us get there, and looked pretty good doing it.
Price and availability
The Nokia 5800 is available now from Nokia for $400, or from other online retailers for as little as $320.
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