So here it is: Nokia's iPhone killer. Except that it isn’t, and never really claimed to be. Instead, the Finnish giant's first touchscreen mobile is a mid-range Series 60 smartphone that likes to hang out in the XpressMusic playground, far away from the N Series' top-floor boardroom. You've seen the specs – now here's a closer look.
The 5800’s homescreen provides a grid of your four favourite contacts, which can neatly be saved as tiny photos. From here you can either press the white centre button to go Symbian, or touch the top right of the screen to get a ‘Media bar’ of shortcuts to important bits like music, photo gallery and the web browser (see below).
Turn the screen to landscape, and the accelerometer flips the Symbian icons round. The touchscreen is mostly responsive, but ours required a fair amount of pressure to work (though this may be due to prototype cobwebs).
Even in landscape, the 3.2in screen can, when texting or in the photo menus, feel a bit cramped (see below), so there’s an emergency stylus lurking round the back to help you out. Still, the menus are mostly intuitive and there isn’t too much lag when getting around.
The music and camera sections use the touchscreen nicely, and nicely show off the hi-res, 640x360 screen. The 3.2MP camera with dual LED flash seemed solid, though there didn't seem to be a dedicated macro mode. Internal memory is only 81MB, but you get an 8GB memory card in the box (with support for 16GB cards) and there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack for your cans of choice.
Unlike the iPhone, the 5800 supports flash, which was mainly added so you can watch our vidcasts on the move. But we found the touchscreen on our prototype to be a little sluggish getting around web pages.
In all, the 5800 XpressMusic looks likes a promising first stab from Nokia at entering the touchscreen world. We’ll have a full review for you soon, but in the meantime check out our hands-on video and tell us what you think in the comments section below.
Nokia XpressMusic 5800 vx Apple iPhone 3G
