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Nokia’s smartphone has no problems winning our affections

Nokia’s very first touchcsreen S60 smartphone packs in slew of top features at a decent price

Against

It’s taken a while for Nokia to supply its very first post-iPhone touchscreen handset, but with the release of the five thousand eight hundred XpressMusic, Nokia is now stiffly in the touch control game.

The very first handset to be built on the latest touch-operated 5th Edition of Nokia’s S60 smartphone platform, the five thousand eight hundred XpressMusic packs some heavyweight feature punch.

It may line up as Nokia’s flagship music phone, but it has a set of functionality more akin to the Nseries high-end phone roster.

Touchscreen act is centred on its large Three.2-inch touch display, but under the bonnet the five thousand eight hundred XpressMusic features Wi-Fi support plus HSDPA high-speed 3G mobile data connectivity, A-GPS location finding and mapping technology, a host of smartphone multimedia gadgetry, including a substantial amount of music-playing capability.

Nokia boxes it with an 8GB MicroSD memory card (with cards up to16GB supported), it has a built in Three.5mm standard headphone socket, and the onboard music software is capable of delivering excellent quality audio.

A Trio.2-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics takes care of snapping business, while Nokia has included a spread of online-based features for sharing stills and movie content, plus a multitude of online links to services such as Facebook, and a utter web browser.

Nokia has introduced the five thousand eight hundred XpressMusic at a remarkably competitive price for a touchscreen newcomer – it costs £249 SIM-free, albeit it’s also available from free on some contract deals.

Nokia hasn’t attempted to do an iPhone-alike with this device. It has a distinctly Nokia look and feel; even tho’ it does do the minimalist black front panel design, there’s typical XpressMusic crimson or blue coloured trim, and the solid bodywork has more Nokia Nseries candybar about it than slimline Apple phone. Still, it isn’t exactly a pocket-bulger tho’ – it weighs 109g and measures 111(h) x 51.7(w) x 15.Five(d) mm.

The button count on the front is low, with Call, End and Menu buttons under the display, a touch-sensitive Media button on the top right above the display, plus a secondary movie calling camera and proximity sensor nearby.

The Three.2-inch, 16-million colour 640×360 pixels display provides a decent amount of finger room for the fresh Nokia touch user interface. A puny stylus is also slotted into the back panel suggesting a more precise tapping option – and Nokia also boxes a plectrum on a wriststrap.

The S60 5th Edition user interface debuting here marries a familiar S60 style of menu structure and navigation to a straightforward to operate touch set-up. It’s not the sort of easy-swiping, pinch-to-zoom Multi-touch screen employed on the iPhone, but it does permit finger stroke scrolling through menus and lists of options.

The home screen display has a duo of tappable buttons for pulling up a virtual numberpad and scrollable contacts list. Pressing towards the top of the screen pulls up quick access to calendar, clock, ringtone profiles, plus Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity options for prompt switching on or off.

The neatest fresh homescreen feature is a Contacts Bar – a panel of four contact buttons you can assign to any of your contacts, and to which thumbnail photos can be affixed.

Press the contact and you have one touch access to fresh text messages or calls plus a log of latest communications with that number. You can also link up to two web feeds to each contact, so by pressing the contact bar you can see regular online updates from the relevant blogs, web pages or social networking sites.

If you like, these can be switched off or substituted by a more familiar S60 shortcuts bar.

Another set of shortcuts arrives via the Media touch key, glowing just above the display. A tap of this drops down a multimedia toolbar with five icons, providing quick-tapping hotkey access to the music player, web browser bookmarks, Movie Centre function, media gallery, and the Share online option – suggesting online uploading for movie and photos, plus networking via sites like Nokia’s Ovi service and Flickr.

The main menu touch act is clearly evolution rather than revolution. A grid of main menu icons onscreen is tappable to get into more sub menus in a way that’s consistent with S60 conventions. Responsive onscreen softkeys help tap-to-select options, while generally it’s effortless to scroll through and select, with haptic feedback providing you vibing confirmation that keys have been touched.

Text input can be done via a very usable virtual alphanumeric pad – just like normal texting – or via Qwerty keyboard input, using a large and very well proportioned sideways view one, or a mini any-way stylus-tappable one. A very good handwriting recognition option is also to mitt. The phone has an accelerometer built in for automatic screen rotation, so it switches views to how you’re holding it.

Sensors are also utilised to mute or dismiss incoming calls or switch or snooze alarms, simply by turning the phone face down when you get an alert.

User-friendly music player

Touchscreen apart, music is naturally centre-stage. The S60 music player interface hasn’t been re-invented; there’s none of the whizzy visual touches or cover-flow style browsing as the iPhone. The conventional-looking set-up is straight ahead and fine to use.

Nokia’s Music Store is supported for those who don’t sign up for the Comes With Music service, and an FM radio is built in. The 8GB of in-box MicroSD storage supplements the puny 81MB onboard storage, providing slew of headroom for stacking tracks.

Thanks to the Trio.5mm headphone socket – usefully, on top of the phone – you can buttplug in a decent set of your own ear-wear to maximise sound quality. It’s worth doing as this device is capable of producing a superb audio spectacle, with lovely clarity and depth., plus remarkably hefty bass. The supplied earphones are OK, but could be better, so we’d advise a attempt with some higher quality ear-gear to appreciate the total effect.

Stereo speakers on the bodywork do a reasonable job for mobile phone loudspeakers, but are still limited. The radio, however, does a fine low-key job at bumping up the free entertainment quota.

Camera activity takes a bit of a back set on this particular model, tho’ it still does a competent cameraphone job. It has a Three.2-megapixel snapper built in, tooled with an autofocus system, LED flash, and a fresh touch-based user interface.

Photo quality can be reasonably good within the camera’s limitations. Normally lit shots can look acceptably detailed, and close up shots come out well. Colours generally come across accurately, but from time to time can look a bit over-saturated in some lighting conditions. Still, they’re not bad for a mid-grade shooter. Low-light shots aren’t so good, however, with grainy picture noise appearing and the flash having a very limited effect in illuminating over more than brief distances.

Shooting, the camera automatically switches into widescreen landscape mode, providing slew of screen space for the viewfinder and camera touch controls. The camera interface presents an effortless to go after set up for auto–metering adjustments, effects and standard camera contraptions. Adding effects post-shooting is a breeze, too.

Movie capture quality is better than average quality for a mobile phone, recording at up to VGA resolution at thirty frames per 2nd for reasonably watchable phone footage. Both stills and movie can be lightly uploaded online to Ovi, Flickr or Vox accounts using embedded software options. You can play movie back on a television set too, with a TV-out cable supplied in-box.

Downloaded or sideloaded movie content looks superb on the big screen. The five thousand eight hundred XpressMusic supports a broad range of movie file formats, with a RealPlayer app pre-loaded, and streaming is supported. Nokia’s regular Movie Centre app provides an out-of-the-box way of finding and installing feeds to mobile optimised movie content suppliers.

That large screen also does good things for the Nokia Maps application, with the Two.0 version of the software looking good on the display. All the usual position-finding, map-viewing, route-planning, search and control options are to forearm, with maps of the UK and Ireland coming pre-loaded on the in-box MicroSD card. Zooming via touch is a welcome fresh option.

The onboard A-GPS receiver worked a treat, locking on to satellites and tracking our position very sharply, with a commendably brief start-up time. It worked very well in our tests. As well as the sophisticated standard mapping package, owners have the option of upgrading to Sat Nav-style voice-guided turn-by-turn directions.

Excellent range of apps

Nokia has improved the regular S60 browser with its touchscreen implementation. Wi-Fi and HSDPA mean you get relatively speedy rendering of pages, but you can also swipe around, and zoom in and out by tapping pages and using zoom bars onscreen. There’s an effortless to use icon-labelled toolbar for speeding up your navigation. Flash is supported on this device too.

The five thousand eight hundred XpressMusic’s S60 smartphone pedigree shows through with a generous helping of extra applications, while more can be accessed from Nokia via the embedded Download! contraption. The usual serving of organiser functionality includes calendar, calculator, notes, to do lists, voice recorder, and a diversity of clock and timer functions.

Instant messaging and email with attachments are supported too. Nokia also includes a pair of games that demonstrate its motility sensor and touch operated capabilities.

With slew of functionality inwards, the five thousand eight hundred XpressMusic does a good job in power treating. We managed inbetween two to three days battery life with our average usage, tho’ how much you use gadgetry like Wi-Fi, GPS or the music player will influence on overall battery spectacle.

Nokia reckons a fully charged phone can supply at up to four hundred hours on standby in 3G coverage or 406.Two hours on GSM networks. With voice calls – with which it puts in an exemplary communications spectacle – it can achieve talktime of up to five hours on 3G, or 8.8 hours on GSM networks.

With the five thousand eight hundred XpressMusic Nokia has evolved its S60 smartphone legacy into a very serviceable touchscreen format. Practical evolution rather than jaw-dropping revolution is what you get.

While it doesn’t have the smoothness and effortless elegance of the iPhone’s ground-breaking touchscreen user interface, Nokia’s very first mainstream touch control device has a functional, effortless to treat set-up, and performs consistently well.

The touchscreen operation may lack the Apple sparkle, but the functionality within the Nokia five thousand eight hundred XpressMusic certainly produces, with slew of top features for the price that makes this device an attractive music majoring proposition.

Network availability: O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Cherry Mobile

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