05 April 2009

An In-Depth Review Of The
US 3G Friendly Version Of Nokia 5800 XM

I’m coming up on the end of a full week with the North American version of the Nokia 5800 Xpress Music and I have to say that I am still completely impressed by the device.

After a rather long wait to have it in hand, what with the 3G antenna delays and the rather weariness of US vendors to stock the phone in the months time after its official release, it came to me with rather high expectations.

I was immediately blown away with how solid of a release the whole package was.

I hadn’t let the numerous reports on rather sketchy build quality, the unresponsiveness of the touch-screen, or the lackluster amounts of available software (or, for that matter, the overall maturity of the OS) really deter me from a purchase.

I wanted to get the phone in my own hand to see what S60-Touch was all about, and I’m glad I gave the 5800 a sporting chance. Here are a few observations from the week.

The first thing I have to comment on is build quality. The 5800 XM is a midrange device, and many reviewers were quick to point out that it felt like one. I agree; the build materials could have been better. What we have is a rather light plastic phone, encased in the ever familiar shiny black finish that is prone to smudges and fingerprints. In hand the phone feels light. Not troublingly so, but there isn’t the heft of say the latest E-series or etc.

On one hand that is a blessing for this device, since it is a little on the chubby side, but one can’t help but feel like Nokia was holding back. There are no real creaky spots or rattles, mainly because there aren’t any moving parts, but the plastic is spongy and will give in certain areas like the bezel of the screen or the plastic covers that protect the microSD and sim card slots. Right off the bat, though, it feels better constructed than the NAM N85 I had a month or so ago.

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Nokia’s continuous bad quality control/poor design choices continue in a screen cover that does not securely clip at the top of the device. The end result is that on the right hand-side of the phone, and just above the volume rocker buttons, there is a small gap that allows light to leak. Pressing down on the bezel closes the gap and just over-extenuates the poor design choice. There is no reason for me to believe this gap won’t let excess dust in and under the screen cover over time, though it looks like the cover is rather easy to remove, if one was so inclined. It’s also crucial to stress the point that this is a design fault in every Nokia 5800, as the top cover simply does not have a tooth/secure anywhere near that location to keep the cover down. Not all 5800s may have the same degree or size of gap, but they all will certainly have or develop one over time. Again, it is not the end of the world, but it is a rather frustrating problem that could have and should have been easily solved by Nokia way before this phone went into production.

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Another thing that is obvious upon using the phone is that the CPU and memory are just sufficient in running S60v5. The phone feels a little sluggish at times. It is never unresponsive, or downright slow, but it feels like the hamster is getting a little tired on his wheel from time to time. Installing Handy Taskman shows that part of the reason for this is the large memory requirements for v5. Unlike my v3 phones, say the E90 or E71, the Nokia 5800 only has about 40-45Meg of free RAM at any given time. Sometimes it will even dip into the mid 30s, even with only a few core applications are running (such as contacts, calendar, or etc). Web browsing and listening to music brings it down further and further from there.

The CPU is also just barely cutting it. Even though this is the same chip in a whole slew of current gen Nokia phones, it feels a bit slower here. Most of this is probably due to the 3.2 inch screen and the higher resolution it demands. However, simple tasks like listening to music and then hitting the unlock key will give you a tiny, half a millisecond, audible break that just alerts you that the phone is trying to keep up with things. This may be improved over time with firmware updates, which we’ve all seen before on historically slow phones (such as the N95 for instance), but as is, on v20.x, things feel a bit sluggish.

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It never detracts from the experience too much, though. One area I won’t give up on is the theme effects. Disabled by default, I turned them on and have left them on. Memory wise I’m losing about a Meg, and CPU wise, sure… things are less responsive thanks to it. This phone is all about the slick user interface, though, and it looks so damn slick when the screen wipes to the next page and etc. Again, over time I think this will only get better with future firmware updates, but the overall experience is limited by the 369MHz CPU and the 120Meg of RAM . I hope and pray that the N97 will improve on both of these stats (and not just one or the other) to really make S60v5 shine.

As is, though, the OS is very cool and really feels fresh and alive. Even after only a few hours I felt right at home with the new variant of Symbian. Things are where they should be, and getting to menus is intuitive and well thought out. A long press on the upper portion of the screen brings up a menu that allows you to access connectivity settings, all phone settings are now in one location (under the aptly named Settings application) and the Home Screen is more customizable (similar to the E-series phones) and useful. I don’t really care too much for the new contacts screen, but the standard shortcuts layout does its job well enough and feels familiar.

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One area I hope they improve on is application launching from the Home Screen. To aid in this, Nokia’s media button above the screen (a small electro-static button) sort of helps, but I find that it is really unresponsive and takes far too long to engage. It works, it just… feels like more of a chore than just hitting the menu key and navigating over to the application I want to start. It would be nice if Nokia tweaks the invocation time to be a bit quicker, especially since you’re limited to only four application shortcuts on the screen itself. Having quick access to web, music player, and etc is very desirable on a device such as this. The hardware buttons are also odd.

Three buttons on the bottom are all you get on the face of the phone, and minus the power, volume rocker and camera key, the actual physical buttons are rather sparse. I don’t mind that. I actually think we could have done without the green and red call buttons at the bottom of the screen. For one, they are rather stiff and invoke only with a directly centered press. This makes the red button in particular a little hard to press when holding the phone with the right hand. Luckily, all call functionality can be controlled via the touch screen and yields much more consistent and usable results.

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Truly, the phone doesn’t really need any sort of hardware buttons, and to my surprise I found the on screen interface amazingly tactile and effective. The default vibration that alerts you of screen taps is quite interesting, but I feared it was also a huge battery waste and quickly disabled it. Perhaps if there was a slightly less aggressive setting, as even setting it to the lowest “1” causes a rather violent and strong vibration with each tap. Even without it, though, I found the screen very comfortable to use and was impressed at how little I missed the full QWERTY of my E71.

On many occasions the 5800’s full screen keyboard actually felt more comfortable and produced quicker and more accurate results. There is no shortage of input methods, and whether you choose the more classic T9, mini-QWERTY (which is usable with the fingernail, but a bit of a challenge), handwriting, or the very large and very usable full screen QWERTY, getting input into the device is definitely a breeze. I tried to be open minded at first, previously thinking I wouldn’t ever really be able to get by with full touch, but was pleasantly surprised that I didn’t have to convince myself that it was completely usable.

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The only real downside to this is that the screen does smudge and look rather gross daily. I catch myself cleaning it two to three times a day; and sometimes right after I clean it the last thing I want to do is put my greasy fingers on it. Even though Nokia shipped a stylus with the device, it really isn’t very conducive to the 5800’s OS. The stiff placement of the stylus in the back cover and necessity to poke and prod the screen quickly on the go also discourages one from using it. It’s best just to get in there and get dirty. The OS is really optimized (in most) locations for your fat little fingers anyway, so perfectionists are going to have to let this one go… Your screen will be smudgy, but that just means it is loved.

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I had to get over the smudging very quickly, since; this is one device that is very hard to put down. The device just feels so good in the hand. The OS looks good, and if you’re looking for portable media content (be it movies, music, or web) this is definitely a brilliant little device. The music quality is phenomenal. I know it would be going in, but I’m still impressed with this device’s ability to reproduce clean, brilliant, and just wonderful audio output. The internal speaker isn’t the loudest, but it is very clear and crisp and makes everything from music to ringtones sound great. Strap on a pair of headphones, though, and the 5800 XM is simply bliss.

Web browsing is a similar event. Even though it isn’t as large as the screen on my E90, nor does it have as high of a resolution, what you do have here is well above average and makes mobile web browsing completely competent. The onscreen keyboard makes entering URLs a breeze and the 640x360 resolution assures most, if not all, of your pages will be presented clear and easy to use. The only gripe I had was that sometimes clicking on the URLs can be a true pain with your finger. I’ve gotten around this by double tapping to zoom in then I single click on the URL. Whether or not this is what Nokia intended is hard to tell, but it is more a limitation of size/resolution than anything else. I’d rather have smaller text links that are harder to click than have to suffer with a browser at 320x240 ever again.

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I haven’t successfully gotten any movies to play on it yet. I have to admit that I am not the most avid movie watcher on my phone, so this is more or less due to the fact that I can’t be bothered to encode my files in a format RealPlayer will play nice with. Oddly enough, it can see the videos that are on my microSD card and generates proper thumbnails for them, but for some reason cannot display video at all when trying to play them. I almost wonder if this is an imposed limitation and not a real software based one. Either way, I’m sure there is a killer media player (perhaps CorePlayer has a S60v5 port) that I could look into if I wanted, but again… I haven’t been bothered. I can only imagine, though, that on a screen this size and at this resolution that it will look really great… Whether or not the frame rate will be able to keep up is another story.

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I want to change gears a bit simply because there is something that is hard to capture in a review. That is, more or less, the wow factor of a phone. The E90 definitely had it, as did the N95 and many other phones that came before it. You know the feeling. It’s not just the overall tech; it’s how we and others around us respond to the technology. The 5800 XM definitely has that wow factor. I brought the phone to work this past week and had to show it off. I work for a company that does software design.

We’re all tech heads, and my specific group has worked on mobile (and specifically Symbian) software in the past. The response was pretty telling. Everyone had to touch the device. One coworker literally had my phone for about 45 mins. He kept saying, “This is so cool,” and “it just feels so good in the hand… just really cool.” He walked away and showed it to our lead Symbian developer who hated the idea of all touch at first, but quickly warmed up to the device. People seemed to share the same feelings I had with the phone… It is just a fun device and really presents Symbian in a very intuitive and new package.

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It’s for these reasons alone that I can easily overlook the build quality issues. I’m patient with its sometimes sluggish nature and… honestly I don’t care about the quirks in the software. I’ve had a few bugs show up. In the last week my phone crashed twice in 24 hours. It was a soft crash, though, and I feel myself wanting to make excuses for the phone. Neither time did I have to pull the battery, but both happened while I was hanging up from a call. Basically the home screen would still show I was on a call, though timers and all info had stopped. The phone sorted itself out after a minute or two and restarted the Home Screen itself.

After the second crash I rebooted the machine and it hasn’t given me any trouble since. I have a feeling it’s a firmware quirk that will probably show up again, but it hasn’t caused me any real trouble. Other things like, the inconsistencies in the OS (especially with scrolling) are odd, but not the end of the world (for instance, almost every menu you pull the screen or a slider down to go down, but for some reason in the web browser you push your finger upwards to move the screen down).

I can live with them, and I know this phone will only get better with each firmware update. Will this be the end all be all phone? No. I know it isn’t. I know as soon as the N97 comes out (and hopefully with a faster CPU and more memory) that I’ll anxiously want to upgrade. I’m hooked, though, and can honestly say that I’ve become so comfortable with the 5800 that I would dread using any other phone at the moment.

I haven’t even thought of going back to my E71 for a split-second since I got the 5800, and I think that says a lot about just how usable the 5800s input methods really are. I love this phone. Even with its quirks, poor build quality and design choices (which are now synonymous with Nokia’s products)… I truly love this phone.