Nokia 5800 TouchScreen Phone
Nokia’s touch screen phone is finally in the preview stage. The 5800 XpressMusic is all set to launch soon as Nokia’s challenge to Google’s phone and Apple iPhone. Its called or nicknamed the Tube and the device has a number of typical Nokia stuff as is visible on the various videos on YouTube.
The LCD is 640 x 360. The dull screen surface cuts down on glare, but casual users often prefer glossy screens for watching visual stuff like images and video. We hear that the speaker is very loud. It’s not the clearest thing in the world, but if you want to share a song or something with a friend, they’ll certainly hear it loud and clear. The 3.2 megapixel camera is getting good reviews and is said to focus well and takes great pictures. It also had things like GPS, WiFi and a side-loading microSD slot (there will be a free 8GB card hopefully). It is wrapped up into an elongated, chubby package, hence the Tube. Its probably too big to put in the pocket of a tight pant but still a nice size. It will also come with apps like Nokia Maps.
It’s a S60 series phone, which is so popular in India and from the look of it you will not be disappointed. Nokia’s seems to have done enough to turn the traditional interface into touchable one, nicely sized icons, adding finger-friendly buttons unlike the iPhone. What Nokia probably hasn’t quite figured out is consistency, requiring double taps in some places, single taps in others. It is said that, scrolling through most lists requires dragging a scroll bar, pulling down as the list flies up, but the browser has touch and drag scrolling. But then the advantage is that most of us are using some S60 phone and we will get used to it quickly.
What’s seems to be new is a touch-sensitive button above the screen that drops down the Media Bar for access to music, movies, photos, the browser and sharing. There’s also a new home screen with a “Fav Four” of sorts across the top and little else. Tap and you can get a quick look at recent calls, messages and even related RSS feeds. Luckily, the traditionally familiar S60 home screen is also available.
From the videos it is clear that you can input by handwriting, mini QWERTY keyboard, full screen QWERTY and alphanumeric keypad. The first two can be used thru a stylus-based tap. The phone looks too narrow to work well with QWERTY in portrait and has to be used in landscape mode only. Creating or inputting SMS in our SMS crazy country could be a nightmare as I discovered while using the iPhone also.
It doesn’t seem that the touchable browser is a step up over existing WebKit implementations on Nokia’s other handsets. The tap to zoom function seems slow and unreliable. Reviews of the browsing experience are probably not as good as the iPhone of the Google Phone. Still, there’s no doubting the advantages of viewing the web on a 640 x 360 LCD.
Games, Movies and Music seem to be this phone’s killer apps. With Nokia’s super marketing muscle in India they will surely make this a big story.
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