When the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic came out, the question on everybody’s lips was whether or not the first touchscreen mobile from Nokia would be able to compete with an iPhone 3G or HTC Dream. Let’s find out.

With touchscreen mobile phones being extremely popular these days, it was only natural that Nokia would jump on the proverbial bandwagon and bring out a handset like the 5800 XpressMusic. This is a full touchscreen mobile, and it comes with a swathe of features, but it’s debatable whether it’s really a true competitor for Apple’s iPhone 3G. That said, albeit imperfect, this Nokia mobile phone is still a great option.

As far as touchscreen mobiles go, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic has been designed much like the rest of the competition, with the screen display taking up almost the entire face of the device. Built mostly of plastic, the 5800 feels pretty tough, but it’s not quite as sturdy as the Apple iPhone 3G. One aspect that could be improved is the small plastic flap covers that sit over the microSD and SIM card slots. These feel fairly weak, and the slider button that turns on the keypad lock also wobbles when pressed.

There are numerous physical buttons on the 5800 XpressMusic’s handset. There are three main keys sitting underneath the touchscreen for answer, menu and end call functionality. Camera and volume buttons, plus the unlock slider and a power key round off your options. When you press down on the menu button an
application manager pops up, which allows you to close any programs currently running at that time. There’s also a nifty touch-sensitive key sitting on top of the screen that drops down a Media Bar, which provides quick access to all of your multimedia features like the music player, internet browser, video centre, photo gallery and sharing functionality. You can hit this button whilst in any application or menu screen, which makes it a truly worthwhile feature.

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic’s display has great colour and clarity, so your images and videos will look awesome on its screen. However, while outside under direct sunlight the picture is not always visible.

The Nokia 5800’s user interface has its pros and cons when you analyse its features and ability to respond to input. It looks great, with all of the icons spread out well, and it has a smooth scrolling action. The home screen is capable of being customised, and you have the option to show the basic screen, a contacts bar, or a shortcuts bar. The contacts bar allows you to put in your favourite four people, together with their photos, onto the home screen, while the shortcuts bar gives instant access to four separate apps. There are quick access icons for super-fast calls, and your contact list resides at the bottom of the same display. A built-in accelerometer turns the display’s orientation around whilst in most applications, and it does this without having to endure lag time.

The most contentious issue for the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic is with its resistive touchscreen, which works differently to capacitive touchscreens like that of the Apple iPhone or HTC Dream. The result is you often have to push down quite hard to make your selections, although there is a stylus if you’d like to combat the issue the old-fashioned way. This screen does have adjustable haptic feedback with three different settings, but though the interface works well in general, the button you push on doesn’t always retrieve your intended mark. An example of this is the need to double-tap to choose your inbox within the text message menu, whereas it only takes a single tap to reach your shortcuts on the homepage.

This Nokia mobile phone’s messaging function also creates some unnecessary challenges for the user. It works okay, but it definitely doesn’t match up to the effectiveness inherent in the Apple iPhone 3G's on-screen keyboard. The message screen actually doesn’t look any different from most non-touchscreen Nokia mobile phones. There are four different means of inputting text into the message screen, with options for a miniature QWERTY keyboard, a full-screen QWERTY keyboard, an alphanumeric keypad with T9 support and simple handwriting via the stylus. You’ll probably end up using one of the two QWERTY keyboard options, but the touchscreen QWERTY version does force you to have the display oriented to landscape mode. After putting in your text you need to hit a ‘tick’ button, which then returns you to the original message composition page. This set-up is a bit strange, and as it’s different from most other mobile phones you would have used previously, it can prove to take a fair while to command well.

The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic handset comes with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth with A2DP, HSDPA capabilities and a USB with a standard micro-USB interface. There’s also a built-in GPS receiver with assisted-GPS, so when used in conjunction with the preinstalled Nokia Maps application you won’t ever lose your way down a dark dead-end alley. It also lets you easily search for addresses and points of interest in your direct vicinity.

This Nokia’s internet browser works fine, but when compared with an HTC Dream or Apple iPhone it doesn’t really ‘cut the mustard’ for rendering web pages or scrolling. The 5800 XpressMusic has an excellent 3.2-megapixel Carl Zeiss lens-based camera, but there’s no Xenon flash, just your average dual LED flash feature.

As would suggest by the name, the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic mobile phone has top-notch multimedia functionality, which is only boosted further by the addition of a standard 3.5mm headphone jack and FM radio. This XpressMusic media player is much like those found in the Nokia's N-Series of mobile phones, so you can see album cover art, and easily adjust settings like the five-preset equaliser, bass booster and stereo widening function. To store all of your songs, videos and photos, an 8GB microSD memory card comes in the box, but there’s the ability to hold cards of up to 16GB.

Pros:

-    Software is quite responsive
-    Interface is very intuitive
-    HSDPA and Wi-Fi capabilities
-    GPS and Nokia Maps
-    Standard 3.5mm headphone port
-    8GB microSD card is included in the box

Cons:

-    The resistive touchscreen needs a hard press on occasion
-    Your touch input isn’t always consistent with your intention
-    Text message process takes a while to comprehend
-    Screen isn’t clear in sunny outdoor situations