Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic

First things first, I love this phone.

To me, this is one of the best phones I have ever used and probably one of the best on the market at present (pound for pound – use see how I cover myself there)

Remember these phones only cost, here in the UK, £250 off contract. What you get for this price is outstanding.

First the bad, and there is one thing that I am a little worried about. Build quality. The phone feels sturdy enough, but this is my second device. I have already RMA’d one to Nokia because the screen housing started to come lose, and if you search the interweb you will see many stories about speaker problems with the first batch of these. I shall just have to wait to see if I am affected.

Ok, now to the good.

Before this I had a Nokia N95 8gb. That phone was almost perfect, but after owning an Ipod touch for a while, and playing with many iPhones, I soon realised I really needed the touch interface. A keypad is just too restricting. I need everything else too though, GPS, decent camera, media playback, etc.

I thought about getting an iPhone on many occasions, but there were too many limiting factors. All the bits that are good about it I have on my Touch, everything else about it was too limiting. Obviously I could have gone windows mobile with one of the sexy HTC devices, but I have had several WinMo phones in the past and they have driven me to distraction. I really do not need to wait 5 minutes to make a phone call while my phone ‘boots’. As touchy feely as these 3^rd party finger touch skins, the likes of HTC and Samsung have put on top of windows mobile, are the OS is still there always waiting to pop up and stump you.

Enter the 5800. It has the s60 OS, which I really am a fan of, a decent camera, GPS, media capabilities, and everything else on my list.

So the camera is not the best on the market, but, outside in good light, it takes a fine picture.

The GPS is fast at locking onto satellites, much, much faster than my n95. I just need a 3^rd party (Garmin come on!) to release decent navigation software.

The screen is wonderful, video look lovely and crisp and the sound is top notch. A standard headphone socket is a boon.

The Touch interface works really well. It took a while to get used to, but now I know my way around it is like second nature. Despite the screen technology chosen I find it extremely responsive.

The phone size is just perfect. It has the typical candy bar dimensions and feels just right in the hand.

Obviously, being a Nokia phone, the integration with my PC for synching and such is second to none.

So, there you go, considering I splashed out and bought this offline at full price, on launch day, I am very happy. It will do me for a while (well, at least until the n97 comes along)

Meh! Rating 8/10