Rogers Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Review

After along wait to officially release in Canada, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is finally available and can definitely rank up there as one of their best devices to date. Other standout devices have there place such as the Nokia E71 for an all around Smartphone, plus the Nokia N95 8GB for gaming. But the 5800 rocks for music and adds some needed touchscreen flare.

In the hand the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic feels lightweight, only comes in at 109 grams and majority of the device all high-gloss plastic with overall dimensions 111 x 51.7 x 15.5 mm. Even though it’s all plastic it does have it’s own elegant style to it. The minimal buttons on the face of the device itself is a nice touch. You only have a call, menu and end key. As it’s main feature and glory is the 3.2 inch touchscreen, with a resolution of 360 x 640. This makes using the device a great deal of fun. The only area that I found a bit frustrating was that you have to press on the touchscreen twice to get to the application you want, usually we have seen a one-click access on touchscreen devices when you click on a desired application.

Music is a massive part of the 5800 and rightfully so. It comes with a great set of speakers that have the abiklity to pound out the music. Rogers ships this with an 8GB card but can hold up to 16GB with a microSD card and once download your music you’ll notice that like on all upscale devices it’ll show the album cover, song name, artist and timing. In addition, you can have multiple application running at the same time. A standard 3.5 mm audio jack is included, plus this if you ever get tired of your own music you can simply turn on the FM radio. It’s easy to start using and setting your favorite channels.

Apart from the music features, the 5800 has a 3.2 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, auto-focus and a dual LED flash and the ability to share your pics via Nokia’s Ovi Share. To access the camera, press the one-touch button on the right side of the 5800. Here you can easily change the settings such as red eye reduction, contrast, Flash, self timer, enable the grid on the viewfinder etc. The camera is a nice edition to this and did capture/process images well. Pictures at night were hit and miss even with the dual LED flash. We captured a couple videos and found the sound and picture quality to be clear.

For the messaging aspect you have several options, IM, e-mail, text and picture messaging (160 character limit). Probably the best feature of this is, due to the 5800′s accelerometer, are the number of available keyboard options there are: Handwriting recognition (very responsive), Mini QWERTY keyboard, Full Screen QWERTY keyboard and Alphanumeric keypad. The full screen QWERTY keyboard is spaced out nicely, and since it’s a touchscreen it will take some getting used to.

I was pleasantly surprised about the web. It renders pages as they would on your computer at home/work. In addition, it gives you zoom options to for easy ready, however the downside is that it doesn’t remember these settings so you’ll have to do this manually yourself. Also, you can run and switch between web pages which is another great feature. Using the web is fast and easy images/text show up clean.

Other features the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic comes with is Nokia Maps, TV Out, GPS, Games and all the regular add-on such as contacts, calendar, calculator, converter, clock, voice recorder, notes and even a dictionary.

Check out the full review here:

This is available at Rogers currently on a promo 3-year contract for $199.99. Other price points are No Term is $399.99; 1-Year is $349.99; 2-Year is $299.99 3-Year after the promo is $249.99.

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