A Blog of a Jordanian, blogging from the Middle East, known for being audacious and unafraid to express anything that does not conform to his mentality.

Review: Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

Posted: January 15th, 2009 | Author: Moey | Filed under: Amman, Jordan | 9 Comments »

I’m impressed! I had a positive experience since opening the box. The unit is well-made.

As a long-time Sony Ericsson user (my favorite phone being the K800i) I was pleasantly surprised to find the phone supporting Nokia’s Mail for Exchange client, the virtual/soft T9 keypad was natural to use.

Music: Transfering 4GB of music took over half an hour to copy over using my macbook, which I found something weird especially since this is supposed to support USB2.0. Music playback is amazing over the stereo speakers on the left side of the device, and I found stereo widening to be more natural over the speakers than the headset.

Video: I had a bunch of MP4 videos downloaded from YouTube that I copied onto the device. Some played back fine, others did not. However, I had a video with Arabic subtitles (the Arabic model is same as EU’s), Arabic characters are not displayed making it impossible to use.

Performance: In most instances, there is a slightly noticeable lag in making a selection and moving back to the previous menu. The lag is especially bad when starting or ending video/music playback, but I’m just being bitchy. Writing an SMS goes smooth, so that’s good in my books.

Connectitvity: Bluetooth is fast, microUSB as well.

Going online: APN and Wi-Fi connections were easy to setup, Connections are classified by Internet, and you simply add the relevant profiles into the group and order them by priority, and the system simply gets you online according to the preferred connection.

I managed to get Mail for Exchange working, and as expected, it worked perfectly and quickly. All my appointments, tasks, emails (over 200) and contacts (over 500) were synced in a matter of minutes. I have also set up my personal Gmail.

Camera: Disappointing. I get better pictures off my Sony Ericsson K800i, a pretty dated model with a 3.2MP camera and no benefit of the Carl Zeiss optics found on the 5800.

Impressions: The 5800 remains first and foremost a phone, media player second. So far, I’m loving it as a phone and was easily texting and calling friends and family within minutes (zero learning curve).

9 Comments on “Review: Nokia 5800 XpressMusic”

  1. 1 Nizar said at 3:37 AM on January 15th, 2009:

    Thanks for the review, looking forwards to by myself one next month.

  2. 2 Shadz said at 1:15 PM on January 15th, 2009:

    Is this really an iPhone replacement ?

  3. 3 WOM World / Nokia » Blog Archive - Another 5800 XpressMusic fan said at 4:28 PM on January 15th, 2009:

    [...] Moey has posted his initial thoughts after getting his hands on a 5800 XpressMusic, and out of the box he reckons he’s had a ‘positive experience’. [...]

  4. 4 Nayef said at 5:13 PM on January 15th, 2009:

    Guys, this is just a normal, old “touch screen”
    iPhone has mutli-touch capabilities!

  5. 5 bk said at 9:32 AM on January 16th, 2009:

    Hi,

    I’m confused between E66 , E71 and nokia 5800 xpressmusic…
    I want a phone with a user friendly interface for sending personal mails(with word and jpg attachments). I am not too keen on music though.

    Please suggest if 5800 will be easier for sending and managing personal mails since it has a touch screen, or E-series will be better??
    I didnt like htc phones…. Please suggest….

    Regards,
    BK

  6. 6 Mahdi F. Al-Farra said at 11:24 PM on January 17th, 2009:

    I think I’ll get one tomorrow!

  7. 7 leonard said at 10:30 AM on January 22nd, 2009:

    nothing amazin, found it a copy of iphone(with less capabilities but new look)… guys need to work hard to fight steve jobs

  8. 8 pochemukers said at 6:16 PM on January 30th, 2009:

    Hi, friends!
    Thank you for this forum. I have underlied a lot of useful infomation for me.
    I have a question: can i ssppaamm in this topic ny sites to ads they?
    Sorry, if I made the mistake, when asked this question.
    Thank’s.

  9. 9 mand said at 9:53 AM on March 19th, 2009:

    u said mail for exchange is working on nokia 5800..bt i think it doesnt work

Leave a Reply