Introduction, packaging
It has been known for a while that soon Symbian Series 60 will take over the Series 40 platform’s position in mid-range phones. As we know, this latter system has been one of the main reasons for the company’s success, as it’s easy to use for anyone who ever had a Nokia phone. The current Symbian operating system, however, seems to be just as fast and easy to use as it is expected from Series 40, and it’s much more customizable and flexible. Today one can have a smartphone without knowing it.
This means we shouldn’t even be surprised by the fact that an XpressMusic musical phone has the latest Symbian Series 60 system, as we already had such a handset, it was 5320. It’s more astonishing that the Finnish guys used a 600 MHz ARM11 chip in their latest mid-range musical phone, which makes it much better than any other phone in the category. And it’s all available at an affordable price.
Thanks to XXL GSM we received a 5630 in a mid-sized box that had quite a lot of accessories inside. Besides the microUSB charger, the small data cable and the stereo headset (which can be taken apart), we also get a charger converter – which makes the charger compatible with thin and thick Nokia chargers – and a carry case and a 4 GB microSD card.
Exterior
Nokia never wanted to have the world’s slimmest phone award, so we’re not used to see a really slim model from them, but fortunately 5630 is an exception, as it’s only 12 mm thick. It’s not large either (112 x 46 mm) and its weight is negligible compared to the features it has, it weighs only 83 grams. This probably made it evident that the new XpressMusic doesn’t have a metal case, but let’s make things clear: the plastic is very high quality, 5630 won’t crack during use like its predecessor did.
There are a lot of things on top of the front panel, in the top left corner we can see the inevitable Nokia label, the speaker is in the center, while on the right we can find the secondary camera and the light sensor. Below these there is the 2.2” QVGA TFT display, which has great color fidelity and readability – even in sunlight, although in that case the refresh rate seems to low, the screen flickers a bit, but I think that’s not such a big problem. There is a large empty space below the display and this is not the first phone where the screen is “pushed” up to the top of the front panel – there were people who really hated this, but I think it’s okay. In the middle we can see the main controls, the five-way d-pad is very easy to use and the button triplets around it are very small, but thanks to their layout and arced surface they are also very easy to use. The same is true for the numerical keypad, which has cool labels and provides a fast and comfortable text entry.
The back panel is typical XpressMusic, there are small pits all over – golf ball light. On the top there is the 3.2 megapixel camera and the dual-LED flash, these being enclosed in a brushed metal frame. On the bottom we can see a large row of holes, this covers two speakers, so we have stereo – of course we might ask what will we hear of this, as the two speakers are about 1.5 cm apart.
On the top there is the microUSB connector and the 3.5 mm headset jack, there’s no use looking for a standard Nokia charger connector, as there isn’t any – I think everyone has figured this out when reading the list of accessories. As the microphone is between the 0 and # keys, there’s nothing on the bottom, but the sides have lots of stuff…
…as on the left we can see the three music control keys and the neckband’s hook, while on the right we find the volume control keys, the microSD slot and the camera’s shoot key. I think this last one is placed too low, and it’s even hard to press, which will make most of the pictures taken with the phone to be tilted to the right. The more uncomfortable parts are the music control keys on the other side, as they are placed wrong, we can barely press them and theoretically we should be able to use them through the case we get with the phone, but it’s nearly impossible to find them, as they are very close to each other and are barely embossed. Although it’s hard to observe on the pictures on this page, there are musical signs above the keys, which clearly say what the buttons do, but I think they look pretty lame.
Hirdetés
Operating system, speed, software
The handset runs the third generation Symbian Series 60 platform’s Feature Pack 2 edition we have seen on N78 and E75 without Home Screen 1.0, as there’s no use of it on a musical phone. Let’s see the new and interesting features of the system:
- Running programs: the list of currently running programs cannot be accessed only by long-pressing the menu key, as there is a software called active applications, which displays them. This feature is mainly for developers.
- Active standby: this cannot be only vertical, but horizontal as well, and there is a separate area for RSS/Atom feeds.
- Caller image: there’s no need for external utilities any more, images are displayed fullscreen, both at incoming and outgoing calls.
- Wallpaper and screensaver: we can select multiple images, which will be displayed as a slideshow
- Animated menu: although it has been deactivated on the first models (on 5630 as well), but now we can see animations when switching from one menu element to another
- Multimedia menu: the multimedia menu from N95 will be available on most FP2 handsets
- Wizards: GPRS/MMS/etc. are easy to configure with simple wizards
- Tags: we can assign tags to images and other multimedia content
- Nokia Maps 2.0: the free software comes preinstalled on most FP2 phones
- Applications: there are lots of programs installed by default. Of course the list can change, but most handsets will include the following: QuickOffice, Adobe PDF, ZIP, Converted, Downloads!, Nokia Music Store, Search 4.0
- WiFi: with the help of WiFi (supporting WEP, WPA, WPA2) and UPnP we can print via a network and we can access our desktop computer through Home Media Server
- OVI and N-Gage: it depends on the handset, but usually both of them are available
On top of the standby screen there is a large speed dial interface, if we select a contact we cannot just see information about her, but also the time of the last call – to put it clear: the call log and the contact list have been united. Active standby is perfect, we can access everything important with a couple of key presses. We can access the main menu with the left softkey, here are there are a dozen of icons, which means that everything fits on a page, we don’t have to scroll. We can freely select the menu layout, we can create new folders even in the main menu – although we will need to scroll to access these.
The handset’s speed is astonishing. I won’t give you any JBenchmark results, as they wouldn’t show how fast the new system is – although it received 15X the score of N96 in JBenchmark 1, but we shouldn’t compare it to a one-legged competitor – but you should believe me: it’s incredibly fast. I don’t say we never have to wait for an application to load, but browsing the menu and screen changes are shockingly fast, just like zooming and browsing in the image viewer, the 600 MHz CPU does a great job. By the way we have 128 MB RAM and 256 MB ROM, and we can use 56 MB for storing date, and there is 3 GB free space on the memory card by default.
I’d rather not start analyzing all the software, we’ll find every program on 5630 that we would ever need. PIM functions are flawless – even though it’s strange that we can only access the calendar from the main menu, the calculator is in the applications/organizer menu – there is N-Gage support with a lot of preinstalled demo games and two “green” apps as well, one of these displays Nokia’s vision of environment protection. All the software I’ve mentioned above (with the exception of OVI and Nokia Maps) are installed on the phone – I see why the second one has been omitted, there’s no GPS inside – and we can also find nine other programs like the English-Chinese dictionary, or the half-Chinese Nokia Avatar SMS.
Phone calls, data transfer, internet
Software related to phone calls and messaging brings nothing new, but since they’ve been perfect already, we won’t feel that anything’s missing. We can store contacts until there is free memory, there are lots of default extra information fields, but we can create custom ones (eg. shoe size) too. The call log displays received/missed/dialed calls only separately. There are of course profiles, we can customize anything we want. The new Nokia Messaging is not installed by default, so we have the old email client, but of course that also supports authenticated IMAP servers and attachments as well – not mentioning that the handset is compatible with the Nokia Messaging service, so we can install it if we want to.
The data transfer arsenal is complete. The GSM-module is quad-band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz), we have 3G support (900/1200 MHz), and we can use GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, 10.2 megabit HSDPA or 2 megabit HSDPA for transferring data on the mobile network and additionally there is 802.11b/g WiFi support as well. Bluetooth and microUSB are both of version 2.0, and thanks to this second one we can easily connect the phone to a computer and use it as a memory card reader for quickly copying music, a ~100 MB album is copied in about a minute.
I had no problems during phone calls, sound quality was great and I didn’t experience any signal instability either.
We can use the MiniMap browser for web browsing, which is still the best on non-touchscreen models. It’s still a fact that the 2.2” display won’t provide a PC-like experience, but if we won’t be in trouble if we have to use it. We’ll find a Facebook app as well in the menu, but this is not a dedicated client like on iPhone, it just opens the browser and it has rather limited functionality, it’s in fact restricted to text status updates, we won’t be able to play Mafia Wars for example.
Multimedia
The handset has a 3.2 megapixel camera with fixed focus, and a dual-LED flash to help in dark areas. The highest available resolution for images is 2048 x 1536 pixels, while videos can be recorded at 15 fps in VGA resolution. The camera theoretically has “improved fixed focus”, and thanks to the “EDOF” technology it has “full focus”: these marketing bullshits make any normal journalist tremble in fear, and of course there’s no full focus or macro images, the shortest object distance is 30 centimeters – besides that everything is really sharp. The ideal distance for the flash is 1.5 meters, it has pre-flashing for red eye reduction. The camera’s software doesn’t have many settings, we can choose between preset modes, we have panorama mode, exposure-correction (+/- 2 EV) and a basic image editor. We have, however, no sensitivity or light metering to tamper with.
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The pictures taken by 5630 look quite good, the colors are bright, noise level is rather low, noise filtering isn’t too powerful, so the picture are detailed. Dynamics range and edge sharpness are pretty good too, so no matter that there’s no autofocus, the new Nokia takes usable pictures.
Of course the musical part is great. The software is nearly perfect, the player won’t display album covers for some reason (although we can see their place), but besides that it has all the features we might expect, as it can run in the background, it filters tracks by ID3 tags and it has an equalizer where we can add our own presets. By using the musical buttons on the side we can pause the music anytime or skip tracks. It’s fun that there’s a speech recognition software, which we can use to only speak out the artist or track title and off it goes – the recognition is very effective.
Sound quality is also good, 5630 sounds really good on handsfree and although the headset isn’t an in-ear one, but it also has good quality. We have FM radio as well, we can use it to record from the web, it does its job just as it has to.
Battery, summary
The battery has a capacity of 860 mAh (BL-4CT), it theoretically provides three hours of talk time on 3G and seven hours on 2G. I’ve been using the phone on 3G, it’s been on for two days, it has started screaming for power recently, but I’ve made quite a lot of calls and used WiFi a bit as well, but I didn’t really listen to music. This means that the phone can take it for two days even with music playback, and it used less we should expect an even longer uptime.
Nokia 5630 is a surprisingly good handset. It’s basically a musical phone, it’s great as such, but it’s also a youthful smartphone, it’s perfect for that. It’s fast as lightning, it has all the features besides navigation and it’s price isn’t terrible either, we can buy it for about 220 euros, which is a great price for such a set of features. As opposed to 5320 the case and the materials used are also all right, so I think that the new Nokia 5630 XpressMusic is worthy of the Highly recommended award.
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| Nokia 5630 XpressMusic |
Bocha
Translated by Szaszati
Nokia 5630 has been provided by XXL GSM. The handset can be purchased at:
Budapest VI. Jókai tér 6.
Budapest VI. Teréz körút 18.
On-line at www.xxlgsm.hu.
Specifications
| Nokia 5630 XpressMusic | ||
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General | |
| Technology | GSM, UMTS | |
| Size | 112 x 46 x 12 mm | |
| Weight | 83 grams | |
| Available colors | Black base + red/blue/silver | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 2.2” | |
| Display resolution | 240 x 320 pixels | |
| Display type | TFT | |
| Number of colors | 16.7 million | |
| Memory | ||
| Phonebook capacity | dynamic | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | dynamic / 300KB | |
| Internal memory | 256 MB ROM, 128 MB RAM 56 MB free for data storage |
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| Memory expandability | microSDHC (in package: 4 GB) | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | 850/900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps) | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | yes (384 kbps) / yes (10.2 Mbps) | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | yes / 2.0 (A2DP too) | |
| WiFi | yes (802.11b/g) | |
| USB | microUSB 2.0 | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | yes / yes | |
| GPS receiver | no | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | yes | |
| Vibra function | yes | |
| Built-in handsfree | yes | |
| Voice dialing / voice commands | yes / yes | |
| Sound recorder | yes | |
| Alarm clock | yes, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | T9 | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | Symbian OS 9.2 Series 60 v3.2 | |
| WAP / HTML browser | yes / yes | |
| E-mail client | yes (POP3, IMAP4, Exchange, authenticated) | |
| Java | yes, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | N-gage | |
| Currency converter | yes | |
| Extra software | QuickOffice, Adobe PDF, Zip, Nokia Maps, weather forecast, etc. | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 3.2 megapixels, fixed focus, dual-led flash | |
| Secondary camera | yes, VGA resolution | |
| Video recording | yes (max. 640 x 480, 15 fps) | |
| Music player | yes, can run in background | |
| Equalizer | yes | |
| FM radio | yes - RDS | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | 860 mAh (BL-4CT) | |
| Standby time | 400 hours | |
| Talk time | 7 hours (2G) / 4 hours (3G) | |
| Other | ||
| 600 MHz ARM11 CPU, 3.5 mm jack | ||
