29 December 2008

User Review:
Why can't a Nokia 5800 be my primary phone?

Before I start, a quick background on myself, this is important so you can know where my opinions come from. I have used lots of Nokia and SonyEricsson handsets since the very beginning of mobile handsets, and I have been eagerly following the evolution in the Symbian smartphones starting from the early days of the Nokia 7650, 3650 and my favorite (then) the Nokia 6600.

I have used and owned Nokia S40 handsets both old and new (currently the Nokia 6300), Nokia S60 handsets (followed up the whole series of Symbian S60), SonyEricsson feature phones (A100 & A200) and finally SonyEricsson Symbian UIQ phones (currently the G700 & the G900).

This quick introduction means that I am going to compare features in the Nokia 5800 XM to other phones I have seen and owned, whenever I’m complaining about something in the Nokia 5800 XM, that doesn’t mean that the whole phone is a bad experience, but there’s a lot of room for enhancements, and I’ll be looking mostly at the empty half of the cup in this review.

In order to really review the Nokia 5800 XM in everyday tasks, I have used it as my primary phone (instead of the SonyEricsson G700) for a whole week, and I have also shown it to other people and took their opinions. This will not be a thorough review of every stone and corner in the mobile, but mainly my personal opinion. The unit I have with me has the firmware v10.0.010 installed.

I have to admit, the Nokia 5800’s screen is one of the very best high resolution screens I’ve ever seen, very crisp and very bright, every time I look at the screen after using some other phone, I feel very satisfied, especially with the beautiful “Haze” theme. The standard icons are very clear and nice looking, a great change from the dull/ugly E-Series icons.

Not to mention that watching wide screen movies on it is really marvelous experience. But in bright sun the readability is not that great, and it’s more obvious because there are no hardware buttons, you have to do everything on the screen.

As for the “Touch” part, the tactile feedback (i.e. vibration) with variable strength is welcome and feels very nice, but I have to place some complaints here:

I have used capacitive touch screens (iPhone) and resistive touch screens (my SonyEricsson G700) and both have a better response than the one found in the Nokia 5800 XM, I think (in the case of my resistive touch screen G700) that this is attributed to the hard glass screen, it’s not a screen recessed inside the phone like the Nokia 5800 XM, and it’s not plastic either.

The hard glass is tough enough to resist scratches and you don’t feel like you will break the screen when you touch it or slide something across (especially when your hands are sweaty and they stick to the screen).

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My second problem with the screen is the response, sometimes I touch an icon and it gets highlighted and I feel the vibration but nothing happens, I guess this happens when I click the icon from the corner. Whatever the reason is, this has not faced me in my G700.

I have to say that also the Media button works on its own accord, sometimes when I click it, I feel the vibration and I see the drop down menu, then it disappears again. This happens about 50% of the time, it might be a firmware issue, but it is annoying nonetheless.

One more issue (I believe it is a firmware issue), whenever a popup menu appears (like clicking “Options” for example) the menu appears then disappears again and then appears finally (in a matter of one second or a bit more), it is very annoying and looks like something is wrong with the phone.

I have read in other reviews about the “one click” and “double click” complaints, I feel like complaining with them, in many menus I click on my choice, and then when nothing happens I realize that I need another click, except in the “Applications” menu, where any small click will open that application for you.

The hardware buttons (the Answer, Reject and Main Menu) are quite stiff to press, and feel more so when getting used to the touch screen then trying to press one of them to discover that you need to press harder.

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I like the lock/unlock switch a lot, it has become really intuitive after using it, and the vibration that accompanies it is very nice too.

The screen auto rotates between landscape and portrait, but it takes a lot of time to do so (especially when viewing pictures or videos), my N95 8GB auto rotates much faster.

Whenever I am viewing something in landscape mode (the phone is completely horizontal) and I tilt the phone a very little to the back (imagine the N96 on its stand) the screen switches to portrait. I found this problem very annoying.

To get an idea, when the phone is flat on a table, the screen switches to landscape.

I also admit that being able to put that phone on its face to mute the ringer or snooze the alarm is a nice touch (you have to use 3rd party applications in other phones).

Oh, and by the way, the standby screen doesn’t auto rotate, why?

The phonebook in the Nokia 5800 XM is a standard Symbian S60 phonebook with some additions to stand for the lack of a keypad, when you want to dial a contact (let’s say we will dial “Wrong”), you have to:

1. Open the phonebook from the standby screen.
2. Click on the search bar at the bottom.
3. A virtual keypad opens with the alphabetic letters.
4. If your contact begins for example with the letter “W”, you have to click the “right arrow” icon to get to the other set of alphabets (the whole alphabet doesn’t fit in one screen).
5. Click on the “W”.
6. Click on the “R”, only to discover that the keypad has changed and only displays the possible letters that comes after the “W” from your phonebook, this is a nice touch but since the letters change places, you have to wait and select the letter from its new place.
7. Finally you see your desired contact, click on the green dial icon, you should finally talk to him, correct? WRONG!
8. You are presented with a list of all the phone numbers under this entry, you have to choose one, and then you are dialing his number at last.

Now, I know this seems exaggerated a bit, but it’s the truth, and for a power user like me who does everything very quickly and sometimes without having to look at the phone at all, this is a very long procedure for me, and kills the phone in my opinion from the basic “Phone” functionality point of view.

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I am aware that there is speed dial; this was the only thing that made me keep that phone as my primary phone for a while, other than that I would have stopped using it immediately.

And I am also aware that you can set default numbers for contacts, but this is not a solution, why you ask?

1. First of all, I have a huge phonebook, in order to set the default number for each contact, and knowing that you have to set a number for the voice calls, another for the video calls and another for the SMS, even if they are all the same number, this is a killing task that takes a very long time and requires a lot of patience (more so when using a touch screen).
2. Let’s say I do that (I did it for the main contacts that I use regularly), and I have a new Nokia handset and I want to synchronize these contacts (either using the PC or the Switch application), the contacts gets synchronized but without the default numbers that I have spent a lifetime to set.
3. Presenting you with a list of numbers for the contact is a nice feature that some of my friends like, but at least another option should be included to choose the first number in the contact’s details (usually the “Mobile” field), at least that’s what my SonyEricsson phones does!

I use messaging on my phones a lot more than I do calls, one of the best features I have on my SonyEricsson phones are the “recent contacts” feature.

When you send a message to a contact (or several ones), and then send another message, you are presented with the 10 recent contacts (or groups) that you’ve sent your messages to, and the phonebook option (if you want to send to someone not present in this list).

This feature saves a lot of time and effort since I usually send messages to a small list, and it could also save more time on the Nokia 5800 XM since in order for you to choose several contacts to send a message to, you have to go through the painful contact selection procedure mentioned above several times, and for each contact you have to press the small button on the left of the contact to mark him, which could get tricky and forces you to get the stylus out and mark them one by one.

That’s it when you’re selecting contacts, now let’s go to writing the message, you press the message writing area, and then the last keyboard layout you were using appears for you to write the message, there are four layouts:

• Mini QWERTY: useless (in my opinion) unless you are one of the people that get out the stylus to do everything and spend a lot of time doing it.
• Handwriting: read above, besides it’s actually slower than other input methods.
• Full QWETRY: my favorite, very easy to use and very fast too, my only gripe is that it takes almost 3 seconds for the layout to switch to landscape and for the keyboard to appear, then another 3 seconds to switch back, which is a very long time especially when you’re entering an appointment for example and you have to fill several fields to fill.
• Alphanumeric Keypad: sometimes I use it instead of the “Full QWERTY” to get rid of the need to switch to landscape each time I have to write something, because I usually use one hand to do things on my mobile.

Let’s say you are using the “Full QWERTY” keyboard and you’re writing a long message, and then you need to check something at the top of the message, there are no arrows to get you to the upper lines, if you know of a reasonable way to do it, then please tell me.

One last rant is the SMILIES, Nokia has finally implemented it in the S40, are they very hard to implement in the S60? They are not important I admit, but they make messages look a lot better, and they have been implemented in the SonyEricsson phones since the Medieval Times.

The calendar application is also a standard Symbian S60 calendar which carries the same problems over; I only have two main complaints:

1. When making an appointment or when you are in any date choice field, in my SonyEricsson G700, a mini calendar appears where I choose the date from, in the Nokia phones instead you have to write the date. This is very useful for example when you want to enter a date that is 3 weeks from today, or you want to select the next Sunday and you don’t know the date.
2. The most frustrating issue that faces me in all the Nokia S60 phones calendars (even the business E-Series), is when you need to make a copy from an appointment.

Let’s say that there was a meeting entry in my calendar today, and I want to make the same meeting the next month at the same place, in my SonyEricsson G700 (even the SE non-smart phones), I can copy the calendar entry and paste it any other day I wish.

And don’t confuse this with the recurrence feature, a real world example would be my daughter’s doctor appointments, let’s say I have an appointment with the doctor today for my daughter’s vaccination, and the doctor tells me that we need to see each other again after 3 weeks for example, then the next time we would meet after 1 week instead, etc….

You get the idea, I can simply copy the appointment of today and then navigate to the desired date using the calendar and paste that entry there.

Now we get to my biggest and largest gripe of all! Since the Nokia 5800 XM didn’t serve me well as a phone or in text messaging, at least it would be great in multimedia I thought, hmmm, let’s see.

I started by copying around 300 pictures and 20 videos (each group of pictures and videos is in a separate folder) from my PC to the Nokia 5800 XM, then I opened up the “Gallery” then selected “Images & Videos” only to find that I have a 6x3 thumbnail view with all the pictures and the videos on one screen without any sorting of any type, and you don’t see the names of the files unless you press one of the thumbnails to get the name displayed for a while then disappear again.

I thought this can’t be it, there must be some sorting features, I looked in the menu and then found that you can sort by “Date, Size and Title”, I chose sort by date only to find a huge list view (6 items per page) with all the 320 pictures and videos listed.

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I remember the same problem I had with the N95 8GB, the workaround was to use the “Resco Photo Viewer” and browse from folders on the memory card itself.

Well, guess what? I found there’s a “Folder” feature found on the Nokia 5800 XM, I got very happy and started creating folders to sort my images into, so I created the folders and then attempted to select the images to move to these folders (mind that the folders are sort of a tagging feature, the pictures remain in their physical location on the memory card), this is the process you have to go through to select the images:

1. You click on the first picture you want to select (remember that you don’t see names, only tiny thumbnails).
2. You click on “Options”.
3. You scroll down using the slider on the right till you find the “Mark/Unmark” option and you click it.
4. You then choose “Mark” and the picture is marked.
5. To select a second picture, click on it.
6. Click again, and a menu will open where you can find the “Mark/Unmark” choice without having to scroll down.
7. Repeat as many times as necessary!!!

Imagine doing the above procedure for a 100 pictures that you need to add to a folder! Impossible of course and very frustrating/time consuming/stupid, all of this could have been solved by very two simple ideas, either have back the “S60 pencil” hardware button (not the ideal solution), or have a very simple option like my “non-smart” SonyEricsson W910i called “Mark Several” under the “Mark/Unmark” menu option, by selecting this, whenever you click on a picture it gets marked, and unmarked if it was already marked before.

Annoyingly enough I went through this procedure and sorted my images into folders, time to try it, now the main view only consisted of folders instead of the 320 thumbnails like before, great, let us open the folder “Cars”, hmm, something is wrong. Which folder is it? All the folders are displayed as thumbnails without names, imagine that? You have to click on each folder so the name gets displayed until you find your requested folder!

Really, no comment!

Oh, and when you choose to sort by “Date, Size or Title” after setting the folders, you get all the pictures and videos in the same huge list view without any grouping of any type.

One logical solution would be a tagging feature like in the Walkman 3.0 on new SonyEricsson phones (my G700 has it), you are simply browsing the picture in any order, you press up to activate the tagging feature, the picture is still displayed but a transparent layer with the pre-defined tags appear, you move up or down to get the desired tag then you press the selection button (or the plus on the screen) to tag the photo, after that you scroll between the pictures using right and left and press the selection button on any picture you to tag.

Another benefit of the tagging feature is that you get a unique icon for each tag which is displayed on the picture whatever the view or the sorting is.

Another issue is that the image aspect ratio is not respected at all in the thumbnail view, if you have a 600x100 pixel image, it will get squashed to a square in the thumbnails, way to go Nokia!

My last gripe about the Media is the video playback, I have transferred several videos with several resolutions and aspect ratios, when playing back you can change the aspect ratio between “Original, Stretch and Zoom”, Zoom works best for me since it fits the video to the screen without stretching it, but if you exit the player and then play the same video again or another video, the video will be zoomed in until the whole screen is filled, meaning that either horizontal or vertical parts of the video are cropped, you have to select the aspect ration Zoom again for it to work correctly.

The music player works quite fine in the Nokia 5800 XM, but it bothers me sometimes.

I usually listen to long audio files (1 – 2 hours) in the car, when I finish driving I pause the file in order to complete it afterwards, this works ok unless one of the following two situations happen:

1. By some mistake I close the media player instead of keeping it on the standby screen or the phone shuts down because of the battery getting empty, in both cases I lose the place where I paused the track, and the track itself, and I have to go through the artists and albums again to select my track. This for example doesn’t happen with my N95 8GB, even if I restart the phone, I open the dual slider, press on the play button, and voila, the media player opens with the last track I was playing ready.
2. The second situation happens when I am for example browsing the memory card to listen to some ring tones, this opens up the media player to play this file and I lose my paused track again.
   In my SonyEricsson phones, the file is played without opening the media player, and my paused track remains unchanged.

One thing only, and I believe it’s a firmware issue, away from the camera quality, when I choose video shooting, the camera automatically zooms in the picture, I don’t know why, but if I choose normal picture shooting and frame a certain subject, when I switch to video mode, the camera zooms in a LOT on that subject.

I thought the Nokia 5800 XM will have an updated browser or something, but I discovered that it’s almost worthless, I will not get into details here, but here are some thoughts:

• Try to navigate your hotmail, I couldn’t even view my whole inbox, I got some weird window inside a window issue, and at the end I quit, you have to try for yourself to understand.
• Clicking on links doesn’t always work, you have to zoom in to click them, and sometimes trying to click the link registers as a double click and the browser zooms to 200%.

Thankfully, Opera released an “Opera Mini” version that is compatible with the Nokia 5800 XM using the full screen, it was a marvel to use.

I also want to mention that “Lonely Cat Games“ also released an updated version of Slick IM, which was very nice to use, especially that you could change the default font and theme to the system font and theme.

The download application was quite helpful to find software for the Nokia 5800 XM, but I faced the usual problems of applications repeated in several places, and of course the “Free” applications that you discover after installing them that they are not even partly free.

The GPS locking was quite fast, and it was nice to move the map with your finger, my only problem was that the street names are very small even when you zoom in to the maximum, they are rendered bigger on my N95 8GB. Waiting to see how Nokia Maps 3 will look like on the Nokia 5800 XM.

I also want to mention that I failed to transfer my navigation license from the Nokia N95 8GB to the Nokia 5800 XM, and after researching the topic on the Nokia discussion forums, I discovered that the license is attached to a certain IMEI and you have to send a mail to TeleAtlas or NAVTEQ to transfer the license to another IMEI within 48 hours. Why don't we have a small webpage where you enter you license number, the old IMEI and the new IMEI so you could easily transfer your licenses?

Generally, the mobile had quite a slow and sluggish response to almost everything, I guess this is dealt with partially in the firmware v11, and I hear that the next firmware v20 will completely change the phone over.

I gave the Nokia 5800 XM to several normal mobile users (some of the mold Nokia fans) to get their opinions and comments, usually the initial reaction when I hand it over to someone is to start searching for a sliding keypad or keyboard, then when I tell them that this is the first Nokia touch phone, they ask immediately “Does it have a stylus?” :-/

I tell them “Yes, it has, but it is optimized for finger use, so try using it with only your fingers”.

The opinions usually ranged from “Wow, a touch Nokia phone” and “Look at that screen, it looks marvelous” to “That’s an ugly phone”.

Generally, when people started using it, they took a long time to get used to doing everything on the screen, but the majority thought of it as “beautiful but not practical”, in one case when I showed it to my young brother, he immediately started sliding things on the screen “like the iPhone” only to discover that the display requires a firm touch to accomplish tasks.

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One of my friends (a Nokia fan) who had a Nokia N73 which broke down, and just bought the Samsung F480 touch phone, wished he had waited for the Nokia 5800 XM when he saw it, just because he loves Nokia alone!

The best experience I got was when I handed the phone over to my dad who is not an expert in mobile phones, and can’t navigate all the menus of a simple Nokia 1100 handset. When I gave it to him, suddenly he found that everything was obvious on the screen and you just need to touch what you want to open. He found it more intuitive to navigate a touch screen than scroll through menus using a keypad and right and left hardware buttons.

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He was suddenly able to open the images and view them, play videos, and use the camera. I was stunned, and then I thought this might actually be a market for the Nokia 5800 XM.

My personal opinion about the market position of the Nokia 5800 XM is that it will be for markets like my dad (a small portion though), for youngsters and for teenagers who would buy it either to show off or to acquire the latest in technology (Aspirational; as Nokia calls them), and finally die hard Nokia fans who want to have their latest offering and that beautiful big bright screen.

At last we reach the conclusion, if you look at the above you will find that most of it was a negative opinion, which brings us back to the article title “Why can’t a Nokia 5800 XM be my primary phone?”

My current primary phone is the SonyEricsson G700 because it does almost everything I need as a business power user and the Nokia 5800 XM fails to.

Of course it has some built in Symbian UIQ stupidity, but I can bear it in exchange for other benefits. What I really miss is the big nice screen on the Nokia 5800 XM, I have a smile every time I look at it.

I also realized that operating a phone with a touch screen and a normal keypad is the fastest way to do things and move around, my Nokia friend saw me once using it and moving with the keypad around quickly then tapping the icons on the screen, etc… He was impressed!

When I thought about a Nokia phone with the same form factor, I realized it would be almost impossible because everything in the S60 5th edition is designed with large buttons and finger navigation into consideration.

But then comes the N97 with a QWERTY keyboard and a better standby screen and media viewer, well, I will have to wait and see for myself then, but keep in mind that most of the time (at least for me), you can’t switch to landscape mode and start using both your hands to do things, we will see.