Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Review

In a nutshell: Nokia's first touchscreen phone is impressively good. It may not have quite the polished feel of the iPhone, but with so many good features, it's in many ways better than the iPhone. Headline features include the very high resolution touchscreen with 16 million colours, the 3.2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, 3G video calling, an excellent web browser with support for Flash, the music player & FM radio, GPS positioning with Nokia Maps, WiFi, Bluetooth and an 8GB memory card. Available in black, red or blue.

Review: February 2009.

We've waited a heck of a long time for Nokia to catch up with Apple, LG and Samsung and launch a touchscreen phone. And here it is at last! It's a 3G smartphone, and belongs to Nokia's XpressMusic range.

At first glance, it looks like it was worth the wait. It's a very stylish handset. All touchscreen phones tend to look pretty much the same to be honest. What distinguishes the 5800 is its sleekness: it's much narrower than the iPhone 3G, in fact with a width of 52mm, it's probably the narrowest touchscreen phone around. This means that you can easily operate it with one hand. It has a lovely big screen too, with a very high resolution (640 x 360 pixels), which helps to make the user interface easier to use. The device has a wide range of input options: finger touch, stylus and plectrum with a virtual alphanumeric keypad, full and mini QWERTY keyboards and handwriting recognition. The display will rotate automatically when you turn the phone to landscape mode. Normally the XpressMusic phones have dedicated buttons for music, and the 5800 has a dedicated virtual media bar for quick access to music controls, as well as functions like the gallery and web browser. There are also physical keys for power, send and end, menu, screen lock and volume. The big question is: "Is the touchscreen on the 5800 as good as the iPhone?" Sadly, no. But it isn't at all bad. It's just that you need to use the stylus sometimes and the whole experience isn't quite so much fun. But stick with the review, because the 5800 has a lot going for it, and beats the iPhone in a number of departments.

The 5800 has a proper camera for a start. At 3.2 megapixels it isn't the best camera phone by a long way, but it uses Carl Zeiss optics, has autofocus and a double LED flash and leaves the iPhone standing. It also has a high quality video camera, which can record at up to 640 x 480 pixels and at 30 frames per second, with stereo sound. A front-mounted video camera enables you to make video calls on a 3G network.

The music player in the 5800 is excellent too. We found the touchscreen controls to be very easy here, and all the features that you'd hope for are here, including an 8-band graphic equaliser and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The phone is supplied with an 8GB memory card, which can store up to 2,000 MP3 tracks (or 4,000 in AAC format), and if your music collection grows even bigger, you can upgrade this to a massive 16GB. The Comes With Music feature gives you unlimited music downloads for a whole year! There's also a built-in FM radio. No complaints for music then.

The 5800's big touchscreen is ideal for web browsing. With very fast download speeds thanks to the 3G HSDPA implementation and a quality web browser, there's nothing to hold you back. The 5800 beats the iPhone here too, with support for Flash meaning that you can watch videos from YouTube and other sites on your phone. The phone is also WiFi compatible, so you can get super fast data transfer speeds in the vicinity of a WLAN network or a WiFi Hotspot.

GPS is included too, together with Nokia Maps. As well as 3G and WiFi, the connectivity options include Bluetooth and USB, plus a TV-Out connection (cable supplied.)

The 5800 XpressMusic is a Series 60 phone, and potentially there are going to be a lot of third-party apps available for downloading too. You get a couple of games and the standard Series 60 organiser applications with the phone, including document browsers and a good organiser.

Finally, we want to mention that the battery life is very good. Phones like this do tend to get used rather a lot, and big screens are hungry for power, but the battery capacity seems to be up to the job.

The sales package is generous, including all the cables you'll need, a stereo headphone, an 8GB memory card, a case, a stand and a stylus. The phone is available in black, red and blue too.

We weren't sure what to expect from Nokia's first touchscreen phone. It's obviously spent a lot of time in the design studio, and it looks like Nokia wisely resisted the temptation to rush something out. The 5800 no doubt has the occasional bug (all smart phones do), but these are few and will probably be ironed out pretty quickly with firmware updates. The 5800 XpressMusic manages to combine the benefits of touchscreen, without many downsides, and avoids being just another iPhone clone thanks to Nokia's attention to detail. It may not be perfect, but we're impressed by just how good it is, and it would be churlish to award anything less than 5 stars.