Nokia 5800 Xpress Music

The 5800 XpressMusic (aka Tube) is the first touchscreen Symbian S60 phone from Nokia. It’s the first mass-market device from Nokia with touch-screen technology.

Instead of rolling out the new touch-specific S60 Fifth Edition on a flagship N-series phone, Nokia has decided to position the 5800 as a music phone for the kiddies, packaging it with their all-you-can-eat (and keep) Comes With Music service.

This choice is probably a brilliant one, because after our quick demo, this thing needs a bit more time in the oven before it can stand with the big guys for a touchscreen-only device.

As you can see from the video, it looks very familiar, being a Symbian OS with touch capabilities built in. At the same time, it has some familiar elements of other touch screen interfaces we’ve seen such as easy fingertip transitions.

For a mid-range music phone with touch, though, the 5800 is pretty well equipped.The specs of Nokia 5800 XpressMusic will include:

* Quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900), UMTS 2100, GSM/Edge, HSDPA connectivity
* Symbian S60 5 Touch OS
* 3.2″ 640×360px, 16M color touchscreen display
* 3.2mpx autofocus camera with dual LED flash and 30 FPS VGA recording
* Built-in A-GPS and Wi-Fi
* USB 2.0 and Bluetooth 2.0
* 3.5mm headphone jack, TV-Out port
* 150MB of User memory
* microSDHC memory card slot (up to 16GB, 8GB memory card in a box)
* Dimensions: 111×52×15.5mm
* Weight: 109 grams

Text entry can be done with a full-screen QWERTY, a mini-QWERTY for the stylus, T9 on a touch dialpad, or using handwriting recognition w/ stylus.

Other touch-specific additions are a new Contacts bar similar to T-Mobile’s myfaves that can replace application shortcuts—giving quick access to calling or texting your four favorite folks, as well as the option to add an RSS feed of that person’s blog or Twitter updates.

Application menus also appear on a nice translucent overlay in most applications instead of Symbian’s usual pop-up lists, making the camera much easier to operate while switching options, for instance. And a dedicated button on the upper right brings up the Media Bar, which gives quick touch access to the music player, camera, contacts, and web browser at any time.

Written by martin on October 8th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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