Wednesday, January 14, 2009

detailed nokia 5800 xm user review after 20 days

Hi all
This is a detailed user review of nokia 5800 xm phone.
Find more software for nokia 5800 here. Facts :
  • After a little time i got used to the phone (yet i still miss the joystick).
  • To no that with the touch you start using the phone with both hands, and sometimes one hand is not enough for normal phone usage (dialing a number or calling a dialed number), i dont say it is impossible to use it by one hand, it is just not as comfortable as the keyboard.
  • In sun light it takes a while for the screen brightness to adapt.

Photos of the phone after 20 days of use :
Dirty : Clean :

And now about the applications in the phone :

  • Main Menu and Screen rotation, based on the accelerometer : Menu is standard for nokia N series phones, though the rotating by acceleropeter function seems handy in some cases, it gets anoying many times. So it would be nice to have a button, or a shortcut for rotation.
  • Clock, World time, Alarms : you can set multiple alarms (daily alarms, one time alarm, workdays alarms)
  • Callendar : very handy, if you used callendar before you will use and this one :
  • Input methods : the input methods are kinda ok for a keyboard person (haven't seen better).
  • GPS : the gps receiver quality is "ok" ( "ok"= 3.5of5 , cause i have a bluetooth gps receiver and it doesn't loose the connection so fast as the nokia), So cold start should in open air should be arround 1 minute : i even got result around 45 sec. it is 32 channel gps receiver (at least this impression i have from the gps status screen). Yet the problem seems to be that the connections are lost, at least in the car, when the phone is placed somewhere hidden. As GPS for phone a give 4 of 5. I really dont have with what to compare, so it is subjective (at least i know that the gps is better than n95). So the good part with nokia you have free maps. And you can buy Voice and Tours (When visiting some country). Also you can cache all the maps you need on the phone (All europe is arround 1.3 GB and it fitts ok on the 8GB mini SD from the box)
  • Applications : As i said in previous there are not many applciation for this phone , cause the platform is new, and the lack of joystick is felt in application compatibility. But in less than one month appeared a few free handy software (SymTorrent, Y-browser, MobilePaint), so i guess we will have a cure for this. Watch this blog for nokia 5800 software nokia5800software.blogspot.com
  • Music player : indeed if you use the pone just for music you could squeeze 30 hours of music from it, at least i used it at work for 9 hours (radio + mp3) atand at the end of day it took me one battery line (this was the top battery line, so this might be more than 18% of battery life). Also Nokia has integrated podcast download and playing into the phone.
  • Video Player and tv out : as video player is used Real Player (and most of the time it plays nicely), the only problem for me is that it doesn't open '.avi' files. Also you can watch youtube videos and save them, but the quality is the lowest, so to listen to sound you would prefer to open youtube in normal browser mode and use the flash plugin from the browser (video will lagg but sound is ok). Let's hope there will be other youtube browse applications.

UPDATE Aug 2010 : after using the phone for more than 1.5 years i can say that you definitely should not buy this phone, cause no good software and the phone just suck in every possible way (maybe except mp3 player), especially annoying is the fact that you have to dial twice cause the first time you get connection error.

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