A returning problem. Such a thing exists in everyone's life, it can be handled - this is not what I want to write about, it's not why I have started this preview with this sentence. But because the staff of Mobilearsenal has such a thing too, a kind of common problem. The problem of having a handset from time to time that you can't write about in medias res, practically you can't write anyhow, as even a single sentence that can be misunderstood can lead to a nice little flame war in the forum.
Hirdetés
Probably everyone has figured out that mostly Apple and Nokia handsets are part of this category that requires crucial attention. The subject of this article, 5800, can be declared as especially dangerous, as this is the first touchscreen musical phone of the manufacturer. As a matter of fact this their first phone of this kind, as although their internet tablets have also reacted to taps on the screen, they still can be called lots of names, but not phones. Let's admit that it has been time for our Finnish friends to launch such a model, as HTC and Apple are getting a larger and larger piece of this delicious cake of the mobile phone market, not mentioning that the great rival Samsung is launching touchscreen models one after the other, and those aren't bad stuff either. Nokia would probably still demand a large piece of this extremely precious pastry, so they had to do something. And they did.
Thanks to Nokia Hungary we had about an hour in the company of the new handset. I would like to put it forward that the two handsets we had for testing are still prototypes, which unfortunately means that we have to wait a while with the long review. No one should expect a huge conclusion, as this cannot be said after such a short time, but we have managed to gain as much experience that makes us possible to publish a - hopefully - interesting preview. We like to entertain our readers with such things nowadays anyway.
I have personally been interested in three things in this phone: its physical size and the software's speed and usability. I have managed to gather enough information about the first during the short time, the 111 x 51.7 x 15.5 mm large handset, weighing 109 grams, even though it cannot be called extremely graceful, it's not large either, so it's basically okay, just like the materials used and the assembly quality. Although, to tell truth, I have mixed feelings towards the first one, as not matter how well 5800 is assembled, it's still made of plastic, which would be no problem, but somehow i feel it a bit more mass-product than a Diamond or an iPhone for example. Of course we shouldn't forget that the new Finnish model is probably targeted at the younger, music fan generation, not businessmen. Independently of this, it was strange to me, probably because I have expected a lot from the first touchscreen Nokia.
Another crucial aspect is the display's quality. The panel on the font has a diagonal of about 3.2 inches, its resolution is 640 x 360 pixels, which has been marked as nHD by our northern friends. As to the best of my knowledge this is no standard definition I could say that it stays for "not HD", as this is everything but that. Of course the quality of a panel isn't defined only by its physical parameters, and the subject of our article is a great example for this: the image on the display is beautiful, the colors look great, the refresh rate also seems very fast, at least based on movies. The 16:9 picture radio has been a bit strange, but one can get used to it. Unfortunately I didn't get a "plectrum" with it, but a stylus has been included in the side of the phone. Well... I felt it's very low-quality. It's made of a flexible plastic that makes a bit of a lame impression, and this would be okay, but its slot is so gimpy that we can push the stylus inside it until a point, but then it gets stuck if we didn't start the procedure in the correct position.
Unfortunately we had no chance to make calls or take picture, although I don't expect any wonders yet of photography, as on the back of the handset we can see the usual Carl Zeiss Tessar lens, besides which there is a 3.2 megapixel image sensor. This means 2048 x 1536 pixels large images at most, while videos can be recorder at the display's resolution (640 x 360 pixels) at a speed of 30 frames/second. We have tried to watch a movie clip, however, and the result was astonishing, the handset had the trailer of the new Batman movie on it, where they make use of the Nokia phone too. I can say only positive things about the handsfree speaker too, it had a superb sound quality. We couldn't try the default headset, as the phones only had the stock case (CP-305), but no headset. We hope it will be cool, but it's no problem if not, as the audio output is a standard 3.5 mm jack.
The multimedia features of course don't make a phone sellable by themselves, the software's speed and usability are at least this important. I say Nokia has been smart when they have decided to make the popular Symbian S60 system touch-capable, as this way previous S40 and S60 users will have no hard time getting used to the software, and this is the exact thing that brought fame for the manufacturer. I would like to put it forward that I didn't have much time to browse the menu, so I can say only two things for sure: 5800 is freakin' fast and freakin' unusual. At least it has been for me, although I had a couple of S60 smartphones in my hands. Don't misunderstand me, the menu system is logical and easy to use, this is evident on first use, but it's still a bit different than those we have seen until now. I am sure that it won't take much time to get used to it.
Well, that's about all we can tell you now. 5800 is a promising device, we hope that it will be available at an accessible price, as I think that it doesn't have any feature that would make it evidently better than the rival products. Of course this is no negative thought, but the thing is that other companies on the market are also well-prepared. So, we're excited to have the phone in our test labs, and until then here are a couple of pictures to make things even more exciting:
