04 October 2008

Weekend watching:
Hands-on with the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

Joe Minihane from over at stuff.tv were lucky enough to put hands on the hottest Nokia phone and publish the nice Hands-On video as well as article with his first impressions, both mostly focused on the new interesting features, touch functionality and the new and improved multifunctional active standby screen.

He said that with a full touchscreen, support for up to 16GB of memory and some neat new media features, Nokia is hoping their first touch effort will give them a stranglehold on the middle ground and make touch phones as ubiquitous as greasy mobile salesmen.

It is indeed atypical mid-range S60 Smartphone with limited internal memory a taste for music but he said "we needn't to be disappointed" because first S60 5th edition phone has some clever interface touches, such as a shortcuts menu bar, and a very hi-res 640x360 screen.

There are also some pretty impressive specs: HSDPA, 3.2MP camera with dual LED flash, GPS an 8GB memory card in the box, support for flash video and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

He added that it isn’t an iPhone killer but it is never really claimed to be. “Instead, the Finnish giant's first touchscreen mobile is a mid-range Series 60 smartphone that likes to hang out in the XpressMusic playground, far away from the N Series' top-floor boardroom."

"The 5800’s home screen provides a grid of your four favourite contacts, which can neatly be saved as tiny photos. From here you can either press the white centre button to go Symbian, or touch the top right of the screen to get a ‘Media bar’ of shortcuts to important bits like music, photo gallery and the web browser."

At the end he shortly conclude that Nokia 5800 looks likes the very promising first stab from Nokia at entering the touchscreen world.

So take a look at their exclusive video above and see what you make of it yourself and don’t forget to cheek the guided 'unboxed' tour as well!