19 November 2008

20 minute Long High-Quality
Video(s) Review of the Nokia 5800!

I have something interesting that I'd like to share with those of you who can't wait for the 5800 to come out and don’t care how much it will cost!

Although I’m willing to spend a little fortune to get this phone and to review it for you I can't get it anywhere :[

Phone is supposed to be available in few weeks and I’ll try to get it as soon as possible but in meantime I’ll at least try to keep you informed about all the news regarding the first S60 touch and point you in the right direction.

The good folks over at Mobile Burn, have recently posted four high quality videos on the YouTube that covers some of the major features of the first Nokia touchscreen equipped S60 Smartphone.

The reviewed phone is a pre-production model for testing and development purposes only, but phone is anyway surprising stabile and the have only noticed two very small bugs during the testing period but there's still lots of room for improvement!

And let me take this opportunity to eat some crow. I, personally, talked down the 5800 quite a bit. I ran through the demos at Mobile World Congress, saw the early video and photos, read the reports. I was convinced that the phone was going to be a bomb. I was very, very wrong. You heard it here first. I received the phone and had very low expectations for the user experience. I've been using a lot of touchscreen equipped phones lately, and have seen some real winners. I really didn't think the 5800 XpressMusic was going to be one of them. Boy, was I ever wrong.

This is a great phone. I'm happy to report that S60 5th Edition, even with the finger touch support, offers a very regular S60 user experience. The user interface does some things differently than most touch phones, most obvious being the way it handles scrolling and its tap once to select, tap again to activate navigation style, but it all works very well on the whole. It is intuitive and consistent.

*click to enlarge