Apr 11, 2010 08:56 AM
2745 Views
(Updated Apr 13, 2010 04:59 PM)
If you are looking for an iphone killer, please stop reading this review here. If you are looking to buy a low range touchscreen phone with multimedia capabilities, then you are landed at right place.
One thing I liked the most about this phone is its design. Being a Nokia phone, it is sleek, thin and stylish too. Phone really feels solid in hands and its slickness factor adds an appeal. Thanks god! It doesn’t feel tacky plastic as like 5800 or 5230. Steel front panel diminishes sludgy sense and enhance delicacy with durability. It is more dominant in white colored phone(I own a black one). Having said all, handset looses its identity as compared to 5800 being built with the same genetics. If you put the handset in front of a person who has never seen any other Nokia touchscreen phone apart from 5800, it would be a challenging task to convince the person. Being 5800 family member it looks so similar to its predecessor. Why Nokia has not tried to provide the phone its own identity? I wish if the phone was offered with chrome/steel ribbon around, instead of red one:-)
Three buttons are provided below the touch screen for call key, menu key & end key. Unfortunately all of them are not physical buttons but they are actually part of touchscreen and require touch input. This looks quite innovative way to make front panel more attractive but ultimately lacks user friendliness since response frequency of touch buttons is really poor; may be around 70 per cent only. Those who are moving to a touch device first time may feel quite difficult to cope with it.
The best part is, it’s a smart phone. Those who do not know what smart phone capabilities are, here it is in short: a converged systems of a mobile phone and a computer, driven by an OS, managed by disk partitions, run on RAM; having capabilities of install/un-installing third party programs, store information, send and receive email, view/edit office documents, streaming media with all network connectivity options. No wonder, this handset performs this all of these functions except view/edit office documents. Run on Symbian OS and ARM processor, its performance is quite fast, responsive and reliable. I rarely encountered any issue of hang/crash or restart.
My primary objective of switching to another handset was to have a better phone in terms of camera, music and advanced media capability. Apart from playing videos on superb screen, I’m actually disappointed on other fronts. What do you expect from an ‘XpressMusic’ brand? Good sound quality and better music management. Isn’t it? But I didn’t find anything special about. My previous nokia 6270 was much better in that respect. Following are my findings regarding music department. If you are looking to buy this phone because it’s a music phone, go through below points and then decide.
It extremely disappointed me as far as sound quality is concerned. It’s far away from walkman/ipod standards. Handset comes with noise damping headset which produces enough bass but it never touches to the sharpness of established benchmarks. My old device nokia 6270 was far better than this that too with normal headsets. Just providing a music player with the ability of creating playlist doesn’t make a good music device. Nokia still has to go a long way to match its counterparts in this department.
The loudness of the sound is very low. It sounds very low on a crowdy street even if the volume level is highest. The issue is applicable to both headset and speaker phone.
A music file can be directly played from the memory card but it cannot be added to the playlist.
If headset is accidentally pulled out of the handset, entire world will come to know what your taste of music is. Music player is expected to pause or mute the sound if headset is unplugged unexpectedly but it continues to play through speaker-phone. This is something which was provided in non-smartphone like 6270 then why not in this model? I faced such situation couple of times because my choice of music is really odd and weird:-)
The best thing that comes with smartphone capability is to minimize the music player in running mode and use other functions like write/send sms or play games.Music files are sorted on the basis of album, genre, artist and composer etc. There is a ‘Find’ function which can search a music file by typing few characters of file name. Also, equalizer settings can be customized and you can create your own presets in a matter of time. Equalizer bands are responsive. So overall music management is good enough.
User interface of music player could have been more colorful and optimized.
The wired headset provided with the phone can only be used to receive incoming calls. I'm very disappointed that it even doesn’t provide volume control keys. In my old phone 6270, call receiver key can also be used to change the song in the playlist. I wonder why this phone so called ‘XpressMusic’ doesn’t provide such a small feature. Moreover, you can’t directly alter volume with the volume key provided on sidebar of the phone, if your mobile screen is locked. You need to first unlock it and then use valume key. I'm a biker and this has made my music listening experience on bike miserable.
There is nothing to talk about the camera picture quality. Images comes pixilated even in sunshine, talking about night mode is useless. Image contrast is very low and never produces real colors. Video recording is also pretty ordinary and video doesn’t produce natural colors even at highest quality mode. Videos come quite noisy and blurred. Camera shutter key is very hard & stiff. But this part doesn’t bother me much because I’m quite a boring person and I don’t visit tourist spots or social events often. Moreover I don’t have a beautiful girl friend :-)
The architecture of the phone is same as its big bro 5800, so eventually there are thousands of third party applications available online to install.
Display: Its not the most fascinating touch screen amonst all but yes, it outperforms to its rivals and that too with a big margine. I found that touch response is way faster and accurate than other devices in this category. Its 2.9 inch screen looks quite smaller than Star or Cookie but its resolution is high. I dont like to carry large and heavy stuffs in my pocket. So this mid-size screen device really suits my requirements. Watching vedios and photos is a delight on this screen due to its sharpness and high resolution. Though its low brighness and contrast results in very poor sunlight legibility. Due to high resolution with somewhat small screen size, fonts and icons looks smaller and you may face difficulties in reading sms or menu items. Being a resistive touch device, touch sensitivity is on par with its competitors though you need to put some pressure to operate.
Final words: Once again Nokia is way behind the race. Nokia is nowhere in the war of Stars, Cookies & Corbys. This may not be a direct competitor of above models as its a smartphone and other are not. But is it justified to pay significant amount of more bucks for being a smartphone? I think you are wise enough to decide.
