A touching experience with Nokia's 5800 XpressMusic

MANILA, Philippines - With so many touch-screen phones flooding the market, the biggest surprise would be that industry leader Nokia would seem to lag behind in joining the party.

But being fashionably late also means being able to scout the opposition. And what better way to one-up them than by focusing a new product on a huge, proven market segment: music.

Pitching its new touch-screen phone as an XpressMusic device rather than an Nseries handset was a stroke of marketing and product management genius on Nokia’s part.

But it’s not all in the model name. The company that made its mark for its legendary user-friendliness had a lot at stake toying with a new user interface.

Which is probably why the 5800 offers no less than four text input options: handwriting, mini QWERTY keyboard, full screen QWERTY and alphanumeric keypad.

The first two are stylus-based, while the other two are only available in landscape and portrait modes, respectively. The keyboard in landscape mode is truly expansive and might make a few Nokia Eseries owners do a double take.

The 5800 even comes with an ultra-cool plectrum (guitar pick) that can hang from a wrist strap if you don’t want to smudge the screen and don’t feel like sliding out the stylus.

The LCD itself is certainly impressive at 640 x 360 resolution. The seemingly dull screen surface does wonders in cutting down glare — a boon when watching movies, something this aspect ratio is very well suited to.

While the graphics for the built-in games looked pretty good, movies are potentially this phone’s killer app.

There’s a very loud speaker at the back. It’s not the clearest thing in the world (especially at max volume), but if you want to share your music without having to lug external speakers, then few other music phones will match it for sheer volume.

There’s also a proper 3.50-mm jack-up top right where it should be.

The 3.2-megapixel camera focuses well and takes great pictures in daylight. Indoors is a different story (as with most camphones), but there’s a rather powerful dual LED flash to help out with that.

But it’s not all music and pictures. The 5800 also packs GPS, Wi-Fi and a microSD slot — all in a handsomely minimalist design. And unlike some touch-screen phones, it’s very comfortable to hold and use with a single hand.

The 5800 runs on Symbian’s S60. Scrolling through most lists requires dragging a scroll bar, pulling down as the list flies up, but the browser has touch and drag scrolling.

What’s nice is a convenient touch-sensitive button above the screen that drops down the Media Bar for access to music, movies, photos, the browser and sharing.

If you’re a T9 pro, you can go to portrait mode and rapid-fire lengthy text messages with the alphanumeric keypad (the phone is just too narrow to work well with QWERTY in portrait).

The handwriting recognition seems good enough, which is a testament to the 5800 rather than my chicken scratch penmanship.

With an aggressively low price point (it’s just under the P20,000 threshold), Nokia obviously isn’t going after the power users.

It may not yet be perfect, but with a novel yet well-developed touch-screen interface, a decently powerful camera, expandable memory, excellent connectivity, and of course, that superb XpressMusic capability, there’s no stopping the 5800 from hooking every imaginable phone-using segment.

All things considered, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is one value- and feature-packed multimedia device. Oh yeah, it’s a nice phone, too.